More than eight years after a massive methane gas explosion killed 29 men, including two Australians, mining experts trained in criminal investigation techniques will today re-enter New Zealand’s Pike River coalmine.
This morning, after a ceremony attended by the families of the victims, the concrete seal installed on the mine will be broken, and the first team will start to explore the long, vertical mine shaft built into a mountain at the site near Greymouth on the west coast of the South Island.
Proceeding 40m at a time, the operation will look for any human remains, and will search for clues as to what led to the explosion on November 19, 2010, which killed Australians William Joynson, 49, and Joshua Ufer, 25, and the other 27 men.
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It has involved a complex operation over many months, including pumping nitrogen into the 2km, slightly upsloping mine shaft known as a drift, to displace methane and oxygen which in combination can explode, then reventilating it.
A portable safety chamber has been flown from Australia to follow the team up the drift.
The move follows a sustained campaign by the families, eager to find their loved ones and angry over what they see as slack management practices and inadequate government supervision of the mine.
While the previous National Party government had said it would be too risky and costly to re-enter the mine, the then opposition Labour Party of now Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has fulfilled a promise to launch the project, for which $NZ36 million ($34m) has been budgeted.
“This was a workplace disaster that was preventable and avoidable,” the New Zealand minister responsible for the re-entry, former union leader Andrew Little, told The Australian. “The mining inspectorate did not do their job, and there was a clear corporate failure.’’
The mine was designed by Australian mining engineer Peter Whittall, who managed it up until a few months before the explosion, when he moved up to become its chief executive.
Unlike Australian mines, which must have two horizontal entry ways, the Pike River mine had just one and a vertical shaft, and the gas monitoring system was not as advanced.
Mr Little said there were two reasons for re-entering the mine, which will proceed at this stage up the drift only as far as a rock fall caused by the explosion, and not into the mine proper.
Two men had made it out of the mine alive, Mr Little said.
“There is a possibility, even if small, that one or two or more others may have got far enough up the drift before they succumbed,” he said.
The second reason, Mr Little said, was to look for evidence of what might have caused the explosion, and those going in had been trained in forensic investigation techniques.
A royal commission in 2012 found that, in the weeks leading up to the disaster, dozens of warnings of potentially dangerously high methane levels in the mine were “not heeded”.
The inquiry concluded: “At the executive manager level, there was a culture of production before safety at Pike River.”
Mr Whittall was charged under the Health and Safety Act, but those charges were dropped in return for an insurance payout to victims’ families. In 2017 the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled that the dropping of charges was unlawful, but the charges have not been brought again.
“The police have said that their investigation is still open,” Mr Little said. “They still maintain an interest in anything that is recovered from the drift.”
Efforts to contact Mr Whittall, who has denied wrongdoing and now manages a rest home in Wollongong, were unsuccessful.
Reporter
Sydney
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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/forensics-to-search-pike-river-mine-site-for-remains-clues/news-story/fa3754ae5a33794524ed16572761638e
2019-05-02 14:00:00Z
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