Back to Portland, again!
I had an interesting experience with Maritime Security, Biosecurity Australia, or someone while on the docks at Portland this week. We were taking wind tower blades off a ship, with apparently some confusion with Biosec about checking the blades (as it was possible the frames they’re stacked into was contaminated with foreign dirt, so each had to be inspected and cleaned by someone official prior to leaving the port), which culminated in a whopping 9 hours with almost zero work being done on the Thursday. Luckily, our bill is such a tiny portion of the budget for these projects so no one seemed to give a shit, but I had better things I could have been doing all day.
So anyway, when things actually started moving, the guy who appeared to be a supervisor for Biosec - but might have been part of Marsec or who knows what - came up to a group of us with a problem. There was a Big M container flattened on the ground on the port. Did anyone know who it belonged to? Of course not.
But what resulted was 45 minutes or so of asking around (I like to say they were interrogating people, but I don’t know if that’s fair), they took multiple photos of the thing, and 2 hours later no one had still picked it up. I routinely pick up trash at my son’s school if I’m walking by it, but with all the weird rules about contamination on Australia’s ports I’m buggered if I’m picking the damn thing up and potentially opening myself to some sort of idiot liability.
The really stupid thing is that I’m pretty sure Big-M are only sold in Australia, so it’s highly likely it came from inside Australia anyway. Got back later in the evening and it was still there.
On the whole though the entire movement went well. Four trucks, 8 pilot vehicles and we moved about 52 blades of the course of two and a half days, with almost none of that happening on the first day. The only time we had any trouble was at about 5pm on the Friday, when the idiots seemed to come out, but no collisions or anything like that.
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