Pike River Inquiry Phase 3: Manager wanted out

Right to the last, Pike’s senior manager underestimated the gravity of the mine’s problems.

Doug White, photo Dean Kozanic/The Press

Five days before the November 19 explosion, an angry and resentful Doug White decided he wanted out. White, the mine’s statutory manager, had been accused by chief executive Peter Whittall of causing a 7 cent drop in the company’s share price after making comments about production difficulties in response to questions from a group of share brokers he had taken underground a few days earlier.

Affronted by Whittall’s attack, he emailed Australian mining recruitment consultant Garry McCure that he had seen the “true colours” of Pike’s leadership, and was not impressed. “They won’t be making me the scapegoat!” he wrote to McCure on November 14. He had recently turned down a job in Australia in favour of trying to make a go of things at Pike, where he had started working only 10 months before, and now deeply regretted that decision. By the afternoon of the 19th, both McCure and a head hunter acting for Solid Energy were trying to contact him to discuss job opportunities.

Despite being told at 3.50pm that afternoon that power had been lost to the mine, no information about ventilation or equipment was being transmitted back to the surface control room, no-one underground could be contacted, and the presence of a strange smell in the air, he returned to his desk and wrote two emails to the head hunters. These were sent at 4.02 and 4.03 pm. One, to McCure, simply said “free now”.

It wasn’t until 4.16pm – 26 minutes after being told of the total blackout underground, that he went to the mine entrance to check. And it wasn’t until 4.35 pm that he instructed control room operator Daniel Duggan – whose brother was underground and who has spoken of how he instinctively knew things were bad – to call the Mines Rescue Service and emergency services. White told the commission that at the time he sent the emails he had “absolutely no idea” there was a major incident underground. The implication that he had callously pursued his own private interests while a catastrophe was unfolding was vigorously rejected by his lawyer, John Haigh, QC.

Nevertheless, the lack of urgency apparent in White’s actions on that terrible afternoon triggered a resurgence of grief and tension among relatives of the Pike 29 in the Greymouth courtroom yesterday.

Less sensational, but perhaps more alarming, were revelations that Pike’s “real-time” gas monitoring system was effectively defunct at the time of the explosion. The mine had only two sensors positioned to measure gas levels in the air circulating away from the coal face and up the ventilation shaft. Of these, one had not been working for more than two months. The other was not calibrated properly and there were obvious anomalies in its readings, it was not connected to any alarm system on the surface, and was hanging by a piece of rope from the top of the ventilation shaft and covered in mud. A further sensor that was supposed to read gas levels in the hydro-mining area had been “poisoned” by repeated high gas readings, and was not transmitting data to the control room.

White said he was unaware of these failures until after the explosion, despite his role as statutory mine manager and “de-facto” ventilation officer. (Although Pike’s own planning documents called for a dedicated ventilation engineer, this appointment was never made.)

A series of methane spikes in the weeks before the blast were also described at yesterday’s hearing, including at least nine occasions when the explosive level of 5% was reached. Yet White said he couldn’t recall many of these instances. There seemed to be no formal process of reporting such “high potential incidents” to him as mine manager.

On multiple occasions Haigh advised White not to answer questions under cross-examination about what should have been done about gas spikes and failures in the gas monitoring system. However, when asked whether gas spikes were so common at Pike that they had become “normalised”, he conceded they happened “more frequently than would be desired.”

* Cross-examination of White will continue today