Mick Tully, owner director of Cava Hydraulics Solutions, says his business is another that is successfully riding out the crisis caused by the COVID-19.
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The Barkly Hwy business provides diverse service, mostly for the mines both here and overseas such as the Philippines and Mr Tully said the pandemic hadn't affected them a lot other than changing FIFO practices..
"I think going back about six weeks ago I stopped fly in fly out (from interstate)," Mr Tully said.
"That did affect us a bit because we couldn't supply the services with the people we had, we've got about 150 people on the books, 25 were FIFO, but still managed to turnaround a reasonable amount of work
Mr Tully said the numbers of contracts had gone down in recent times but that wasn't necessarily due to COVID-19.
"Mount Isa Mines have cut their budget a fair bit, that has affected us more than COVID," he said.
That's fair enough, they've obviously come to the conclusion they've spent too much money for the year so far but as far as COVID is concerned it hasn't really affected us as a company."
Mr Tully said has affected some of his suppliers of steel and welding consumables.
"There has been a significant slowing down of freight, Freight in Mount Isa is shocking, you pay your money to get something overnight, sometimes it might turn up the next day, sometimes it might be a week," he said.
"You ring suppliers, too bad, there's nothing you can do about. The worst thing is you promise a client it is going to be done in three days and the material doesn't turn up."
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In terms of work practices, the main change has been daily temperature checking on site every morning.
"We have two buses to take people to the mines, we do temperature testing on them, and the mines do temperature testing when you go through the gates." Mr Tully said.
"We've started flying people in since last Monday they've got to fill out a form to be compliant with Queensland Health. We only bring them in from Queensland. They fly in here, we fill out the COVID form, they register with us.and they go to work."
Mr Tully was convinced there would be permanent changes as a result of COVID-19,
"It will affect hospitality the most, it's the way of the world," he said.
"Maybe it's a good thing, personal hygiene, personal health could be something that needed to change.,
"I would like to think we can get back to shaking hands, because it's the Australian way."
Mr Tully's experience of the relative lack of impact tallies with other accounts the North West Star has heard and he puts it down to the nature of the local economy.
"Mount Isa may be isolated but even in the GFC it didn't really affect the engineering companies," he said.
"Obviously there's retail people that are struggling, once people start buying off the internet it will be hard to get them back off.
Mr Tully wanted to see the borders reopened if they set guidelines in place
"It's easy to shut the borders down, the difficult thing to challenge them to re-open them."
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