Naval Mines In The Civil War

CIO Profile: African Minerals Paul Harrison mining a new seam of profit

It took Paul Harrison a couple of weeks to respond to our email requesting an interview, but when he did it summed up his working life rather well. "Just back from Sierra Leone," he wrote, hastily. "Please go ahead and set it up."

Harrison is the CIO of African Minerals, the largest company by market capitalisation on the London AIM market.

Give it a couple of years, he says, and the group could well be looking down from the lofty heights of the FTSE 100, such is the size of the iron ore deposit the company stumbled across while exploring for diamonds.

The reason Harrison hadn't responded to our email earlier became clear when we did eventually speak.

He doesn't always have access to email. Neither does he have access to 3G networks.

He travels to his sites through dense jungle and speaks to his CEO via satellite phone. Life as a mining CIO in western Africa is a world away from western Europe.

"We've gone through the exploration phase of identifying the size of the iron-ore body, and are now into construction and operations," he explains. “We’re finalising the construction of a port to allow vessels to take our product to market.”

Harrison makes regular trips to Sierra Leone, known predominantly for diamond mines and civil war, via a direct BMI flight from Heathrow to Freetown.

It’s a route which has made life marginally easier for him when establishing a brand new IT and telecoms infrastructure in a country which boasts neither.

“Had we had significantly more money to invest, I think we would have used choppers and taken it on almost as a military operation,” he says. “But that was just cost restrictive from a business perspective.”

Harrison’s point about the availability of cash is important. Traditionally, the mining sector looks at technology with suspicion, as a necessary cost , rather than an investment.

With such huge sums of money being spent in other areas (in the case of African Minerals, the port Harrison speaks of is only the first; with a deep-sea port capable of accepting much larger vessels, also planned) it’s perhaps not surprising that CFOs look to save every penny they can.

Civil War Navy Sesquicentennial: Union Navy Fends Off Mine ...

Early in the Civil War, it wasn’t the electrically-triggered torpedoes set up in long and deadly water ranges that later so troubled Union Navy officers in the upper James River, on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, or just outside the port cities of Charleston and Mobile. Their concerns in Hampton Roads centered on floating torpedoes or mines in wooden casks and the use of the tides and currents to carry them into their anchorages. For almost a year, mines in Hampton Roads were never far from Union Navy leaders minds – first in how to defend against them and later how to employ them to destroy the greatest menace they would face in the war. The Union Navy had escaped disaster in July before the Battle of Bull Run when Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury and his raiding party had floated a number of mines toward the anchored fleet off Fortress Monroe in Hampton Roads. Maury's idea was to let the tide and current carry the powder-laden oak casks toward the ships. The pairs of casks were connected by a span of rope about 600 feet in length, and corks kept the span afloat. The explosives, contained in the barrels, were submerged, and the triggers were in the barrelheads.

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