Pike River Inquiry Phase two: Mines Rescue advice ignored

The Pike rescue operation suffered from “operational paralysis”, the commission has heard.

Trevor Watts, photo John Kirk-Anderson/The Press

The families of the Pike 29 have waited for 10 months for signs of progress towards retrieval of their men’s bodies, but the commission heard yesterday that this could have happened long ago if the advice of mining experts had been heeded.

Trevor Watts, general manager of the Mines Rescue Service, told the commission on day 13 of hearings that a proposal to seal the mine had been put forward two days after the first explosion, but it was blocked by the Department of Labour. Had sealing occurred, the bodies could have been recovered, vital evidence as to the cause of the explosion could have been preserved, and the mine could have been saved to enable exploitation of the coal resource in the future.

Within a few hours of the blast, Watts had concluded that the men would have died immediately from the force of the explosion or from the noxious fumes generated by the blast. Factors supporting that conclusion included CCTV footage showing the magnitude of the 52-second blast at the mine portal, and the fact that by 9.00pm that evening carbon monoxide levels underground were 900 parts per million (700 ppm is fatal after 30 minutes).

Watts said any man who had survived the initial blast and been able to don his self-rescue gear would have had enough oxygen to make it to the so-called fresh air base, where he could put on a new self-rescue kit and make his way out the main tunnel. Miners had been trained to attempt self-escape, and not to barricade themselves in – as some have suggested they may have done.

Any miner who had fallen injured would have survived only if he had access to the compressed air line, and it was known by the first night that very little air was reaching the upper parts of the mine. By day three it was known that the line had broken. The suggestion that survivors may have huddled in a “pocket of air” awaiting rescue was also rubbished by Watts. Pike was a “gassy” mine, and the gas drainage line was ruptured. Methane, which is lighter than air, would have flowed into the roof cavities and displaced any air until the entire void was full of gas. In addition, there was no emergency egress from the mine, which meant if the main tunnel was blocked, survivors had no alternative path out. On the evening after the first blast a bucket containing a phone had been dropped from the ridge-top down the “slimline” shaft – at the bottom of which was the fresh air base – but this elicited no communication from inside the mine.

Although Mines Rescue developed a detailed plan to guide their actions in the event that atmospheric conditions became safe enough to enter the mine, Watts said that no such “window of opportunity” emerged in the five days before the second explosion.

He described how Mines Rescue personnel had arrived to an information vacuum on the afternoon of the first explosion: Pike had no tube bundle gas monitoring system, which would have provided atmospheric samples from the period just before the blast, and the real-time electronic gas monitoring system was destroyed. There were no established boreholes to take gas samples from; there was no current mine map available (the mine surveyor had to hand-draw current workings); and there was confusion about how many men were underground. McConnell Dowell contractors, who had exited one-and-a-half minutes before the explosion, had been allowed to leave the site without being interviewed.

The rescue operation was “dysfunctional and chaotic” in the early hours, and Watts said the advice of mining experts was often “not taken on board”  – despite the fact that seven of the country’s 13 qualified first-class mine managers were at the mine site, as were experts in gas analysis, ventilation, mine engineering, geology and surveying.

Yet the commission has heard in earlier evidence that police officers running the operation had scoured the globe for mining expertise to help them, and had to be given “mining 101” briefings from Department of Labour personnel – who themselves lacked technical expertise in underground coal mining.

Decisions were subject to “anonymous external review and control” that led to a sense of “operational paralysis” and frustration for those working on the operation at the mine site. Even after the second explosion, when Watts advised those in command that sealing the mine was urgent because of the increased risk of further explosions, there was “no urgency to make decisions”. There were two further explosions within the following four days.

Counsel for the police, Simon Moore, attempted to saddle Watts himself with responsibility for the failure of officials to heed the Mines Rescue Service recommendation to seal the mine early on. He asked Watts what steps he had taken to raise the matter with local policemen who he knew well, or with incident controller Superintendent Gary Knowles. Watts noted that if he was ever in the same position again, he would be knocking on Knowles’s door and making his views known much more strongly.

Watts gave an emotional assurance to the victims’ families that Mines Rescue volunteers stood ready to enter the tunnel to attempt recovery of the bodies. “To a man, every one of our members is totally committed to bringing home as many of those men as possible … I firmly believe that in time the top part of that mine will be entered where the men are.”

• Earlier in the day, Department of Labour official Lesley Haines faced the accusation that her department had a conflict of interest in its investigation into the Pike explosion. The department is the prosecuting agency under the Health and Safety in Employment Act, yet one of its inspectors had approved the use of the mine’s 108m vertical ventilation shaft as the second means of egress from the pit – despite the fact that a test run had shown it was entirely unsuitable and would have been impossible for a miner wearing self-rescue apparatus to climb to the top of the ladder. Counsel for the Engineers Union, Nigel Hampton, said the department was in the invidious position of allowing a “non-compliant mine”.

Haines acknowledged “there is some conflict” between the department’s inspectorate and investigative roles.

John Haig, counsel for former mine manager Doug White, went so far as to suggest the department inspector who approved the use of the vent shaft as an exit was “in the firing line”. Haig’s line of questioning was rapidly shut down by commission chairman Graham Panckhurst.