Imagine standing on a platform the size of a small apartment, swaying gently in the coastal wind, 74 metres above the sea. Below you, the berth is closed for the shutdown. Around you, a structure the weight of hundreds of cars holds everything together. And your job is to take it apart, restore it, protect it, and put it all back together again, while the rest of the terminal keeps running without interruption.
That is roughly where Dean Marks spent a significant part of his working life in late 2025.
“What would surprise people most about working on a ship loader?” he was asked afterwards.
“The amount of movement at the top of the structure on a windy day,” he said. “And the view from the top.”
Hay Point: More than a port
For readers outside Australia, Hay Point might not immediately ring a bell. But the numbers tell a story worth pausing on.
Located south of Mackay on the Queensland coast, Hay Point Coal Terminal is one of the largest coal export facilities in the world. Operated by BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA), it connects the mines of the Bowen Basin, one of Australia’s most productive and economically significant coalfields, directly to global shipping routes. The terminal has an export capacity of over 55 million tonnes of coal per year. That is not a regional port. That is a critical node in the global supply chain for metallurgical coal, the kind used in steelmaking furnaces across Asia, Europe, and beyond.
Australia, together with Indonesia, accounts for roughly a quarter of global coal exports. When a terminal like Hay Point runs, the world’s steel industry runs a little more smoothly. When something at Hay Point needs to stop for maintenance, the pressure to get it back online is immense.
The last link in the chain
Think of a ship loader as a giant mechanical arm, a conveyor and boom system that reaches out over a docked vessel and pours bulk material, in this case coal, directly into the ship’s hold at rates of several thousand tonnes per hour. It is the final link in a chain that starts deep underground in a mine and ends in a furnace on the other side of the world.
Ship Loader 3 sits at Berth 3 of the Hay Point terminal. It is one of several loaders operating in parallel at the site, each one a high-capacity, high-throughput machine that has been doing its job for decades. The terminal has been in operation since 1971, and assets like Ship Loader 3 are not replaced lightly. They are maintained, refurbished, and extended in life, because the cost and complexity of replacement in a live, high-throughput environment is enormous.
That is exactly what this project was about.
Generic illustration of a coal terminal with its land and sea side
No new build. But no small job either.
In late 2025, KAEFER Australia was engaged to carry out a major shutdown refurbishment of Ship Loader 3 as part of BMA’s broader asset maintenance programme. This was not a new build. It was a brownfield execution on a structure that was still part of an active terminal, with all the constraints, interface risks, and zero-tolerance for delay that comes with that.
The scope was multi-disciplinary from the start: scaffolding, protective coatings, electrical disconnection and reinstatement, and logistics. At peak, 184 people were working across all of these disciplines simultaneously, day and night.
Dean Marks, Project Superintendent for KAEFER in Queensland, was the person responsible for making it all work.
“The first thing that goes through my mind when getting involved with a project like Ship Loader 3,” he says, “is: how can we deliver this scope of work safely, considering the sheer volume of high-risk work to be undertaken around the clock over an extended period?”
525 Tonnes. 49 Days. No margin for error.
The scaffolding scope alone was a significant engineering undertaking. In total, 525 tonnes of scaffold was installed over 49 days, covering a structure that rises 74 metres above the berth and sits over open water.
To put that in perspective: 525 tonnes is roughly the weight of 350 family cars. And it all had to be engineered, erected, and made safe on a structure with a small footprint relative to its height, with weight constraints on the berth below, irregular geometry over water, and significant wind loads at height.
“We broke the structure down into four areas and focused on solving the challenges that each area presented,” Dean explains, “before linking the design together and confirming the scaffold would function as intended as a whole.”
The result was a structure that had to work on every level, literally:
- A base scaffold structure measuring 30 by 45 metres, narrowing to 20 by 20 metres at height
- Engineered heavy-duty cantilevered loading bays on the top chord of the boom
- A hung scaffold on the boom itself, with integrated access and loading systems
- Dual stretcher stair systems and dedicated access walkways for emergency response
- Engineered netting systems to eliminate dropped object risks and allow concurrent work at different levels
That last point matters more than it might seem. In a multi-discipline shutdown, the ability to work at multiple levels simultaneously is the difference between finishing on time and finishing late. The netting systems were not just a safety measure. They were a productivity enabler.
Salt, wind, and 100 tonnes of abrasive
Once the scaffold was in place, the coatings team went to work. The scope involved full encapsulation of work areas up to 74 metres, hot washing, abrasive blasting, structural repair works, and the application of a multi-layer protective system including zinc primer, stripe coat, and topcoat.
In a marine environment, this is not straightforward. Salt air, humidity, and wind all affect surface preparation and coating adhesion. But the bigger challenges on this project were logistical and environmental.
“Moving thousands of litres of paint and solvents to areas safely was our largest challenge,” Dean says, “along with preventing spills into the marine environment.”
The team also had to manage the recovery of spent abrasive from the blasting process. Over 100 tonnes of garnet was recovered using a vacuum recovery unit, a deliberate and disciplined approach to environmental stewardship on a working berth. Encapsulation materials were secured specifically to eliminate the risk of plastic entering the water.
These are not small details. They reflect the kind of operational discipline that a client like BMA expects, and that KAEFER’s team delivered.
Power off, power on, back to zero
While scaffolding and coatings were underway, the electrical team was working in parallel. All electrical components within the work zones had to be safely disconnected and repositioned to allow coatings access, then reinstalled, tested, and returned to service once the coatings work was complete and inspected.
In a shutdown environment, electrical reinstatement is often on the critical path. Getting it wrong, or getting it late, can delay the entire project. Getting it right means the ship loader goes back online on schedule.
Plan A, B, C, D. Always a next move ready.
Managing 184 people across four disciplines, two shifts, and a client with zero appetite for disruption requires more than good intentions. It requires a system. Dean’s approach started before the shutdown began. During the early engagement period, the team developed the schedule and task sequencing in direct collaboration with BMA.
“We mapped out the process and prioritised critical path activities, whilst building redundancy in the plan by ensuring our work groups had multiple work fronts accessible in case of emergent changes,” he explains. “Plan A, B, C, D. Always a next move ready.”
Each shift ended with a detailed handover process. Each shift began with a stakeholder schedule update meeting. The goal was simple: give the oncoming crew the best possible chance to achieve their objectives, regardless of what the previous shift had encountered.
And things did go wrong. They often do on a project of this scale. When the coatings team discovered a large volume of structural defects at the top of the structure, the planned starting point for painting had to change. “Our team came up with a plan quickly and adapted to the challenge,” Dean says. That sentence is short. The reality behind it was not.
Reinforcements from within
One of the more telling moments of the project came when the vendor responsible for structural remediation ran into resourcing difficulties, compounded by a larger-than-expected volume of emergent structural defects. The timeline was under pressure.
KAEFER’s response was to mobilise 14 boilermakers at short notice, drawing on tradespeople already employed within the business who had experience across BMA’s other five sites in the Bowen Basin.
This was not a scramble. It was a structured response built on an existing relationship with the client and a workforce that already understood BMA’s standards and expectations. “This ensured we were able to provide, with confidence, skilled tradespeople that could deliver the standard quality required for the project,” Dean says.
What trust actually means
Throughout the project, the team was working on a live operational berth. Coal export operations continued around them. The margin for a safety incident, in terms of its consequences for the project, the client relationship, and most importantly the people involved, was zero.
“We provide an environment where everyone understands their authority to stop work for safety, report incidents or near misses, and we tie in directly with the site production team to ensure the shutdown does not impact the operating areas of the port,” Dean says.
That kind of culture does not appear overnight. It is built through consistency, and consistency requires presence.
“We maintain good relations with BMA and build trust by maintaining a presence on site outside of shutdowns,” Dean explains. “This gives the client confidence we can operate on their site safely and effectively.”
Trust, in this context, is not a soft concept. It is a commercial and operational asset that took years to build and that made this project possible. When it was over, Dean kept it simple.
“It was a real sense of achievement for the whole team. And I was glad to be able to take some family time over the Christmas break.”
On the Queensland coast, Ship Loader 3 is back at work. So is the team, already on to the next project.
Note: Written by humans – with a little help from GenAI. This article combines human understanding and intelligent digital tools to bring KAEFER stories to life.