26 September, 2011
The second phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s investigation into the deadly Pike River mine disaster in New Zealand in November 2010 concluded in Greymouth on Friday, 23 September. It produced important revelations regarding inept police supervision after the tragedy, lax emergency response and planning by Pike River Coal, and misguided decisions that still have prevented the recovery of bodies of 29 dead miners.
The Pike River Coal Ltd. explosion of 19 November – and five subsequent blasts in the days following – is New Zealand’s worst mining disaster in 100 years and Royal Commission hearings are succeeding in illuminating serious malpractices that have no place in modern mining. This second set of three-week hearings that began on 5 September will be followed by a third phase in November.
The three-member commission heard testimony on time and information lapses in rescue and recovery between local and national police supervision. And they heard the frustration of an Australian Construction, Forestry, Mine and Energy Union (CFMEU) expert from the Queensland Mines Rescue team, whose team arrived at Pike River in the immediate days after the blast, only to be sidelined and kept out of the monitoring loop.
Timothy Whyte, a chief safety inspector of the CFMEU, told how he witnessed, on 30 November, contractors ignore a warning and place flammable polyurethane around a GAG machine used to extract deadly gases from the mine. The material did catch fire. It took only an hour to extinguish, White said, because the fire retardant apparatus was nearby, but it cost the recovery team valuable time in sealing the mine.
In other testimony, the panel heard from the New Zealand Mines Rescue general manager who said that off-site control by national police in Wellington resulted in “operational paralysis.” One of the commission members, Stewart Bell, a state Mine Safety commissioner from Australia, asked a senior police commissioner, “How much time was wasted, training police officers, in mining matters when you could have had someone there from the word go that understood the word terminology from the word go?”
NZ Mines Rescue also was sidelined in the aftermath. The general manager said he advised the police and Labour Department on 21 November to immediately seal the mine to prevent intake of air. They rejected the idea and within days five more explosions occurred. Sealing would have made it possible to recover the bodies sooner.
Whyte testified earlier that he was flabbergasted to witness a large ventilation fan positioned at a portal pumping fresh air into the shaft in the early stages of rescue and recovery.
Eleven of the 29 dead were members of ICEM affiliate Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU). The union’s attorney questioned witnesses on safety practices of Pike River Coal Ltd. He heard testimony that the company failed to provide enough drift-runners to mechanically evacuate miners in event of an emergency. A control room operator, who lost his brother in the disaster and was manning internal and external telephone lines at the time of the blast, testified that telephones into the mine sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
A safety and training manager of Pike River Coal Ltd., who lost a son in the blast, admitted that he was always concerned that a long ventilation shaft served as the mine’s prerequisite second escape route. It was revealed climbing the laddered shaft could take up to 45 minutes and Pike River provided self-rescuers with only 30 minutes of fresh oxygen.
In the final week of the Inquiry, last week, panel members heard from seven family members of the deceased who spoke on ineffective communication and outreach by authorities. November’s third stage of the Royal Commission of Inquiry will deal with the cause of the disaster.