Executive Risk Solutions has finalised a contract worth double its annual turnover, signing a $30 million, two-year deal to provide emergency response and security at the Roy Hill iron ore project.
Executive Risk Solutions has finalised a contract worth double its annual turnover, signing a $30 million, two-year deal to provide emergency response and security at the Roy Hill iron ore project.
The Melville-based company currently employs 65 security and emergency service staff at Roy Hill, where it has been carrying out work on an interim basis.
ERS’s work at Roy Hill has helped it grow within four years from a start up to a business employing 80 staff, with revenue of more than $15 million last financial year.
Managing director Scott Houston said he believed the contract with Roy Hill was one of the largest emergency response contracts ever awarded in Australia.
Typically, he said, mines hired a few professional emergency service officers who trained mine staff as volunteers.
“What Roy Hill have done, which is I think at a world class standard, is they’ve gone to ensure safety. To ensure the response capability is maintained through the entire project (they’ve decided) we will have a permanent professional, not volunteer, emergency response team on each site,” Mr Houston said.
A Roy Hill spokesman said it its contract with ERS involved providing prevention strategies, planning, incident management and emergency response.
ERS will also continue to attend emergency situations outside of Roy Hill, including a fire near Port Hedland last week and remote traffic accidents.
“As well as protecting our key assets, we believe it is a key community responsibility to provide broader services for the greater public good,” the spokesman said.
Mr Houston said despite being new to the emergency service industry, ERS now received job enquiries from half a dozen people a week.
“We’re the new kids on the block, but we’re focusing on doing it better than anyone else,” he said.
“We really push for a professional emergency service officer and we demand fairly high standards. We’re pretty much swamped with between five to six new applicants every week.
“I think it’s because other emergency service operators within the industry have talked about the way we do things, the equipment that we use and the processes behind how our company runs. The fact that we’ve just sent guys off to Texas Engineering, which is a major university in the US that specialises in emergency response.”
While ERS is not planning to take on any emergency service officers at present, it has tendered to provide security services at the port with Roy Hill major contractor Samsung C&T.
