Pike River Inquiry Phase two: Families encouraged to hope

The Inquiry into the mine explosion has heard allegations that disaster experts were sidelined by police.

Assistant Commissioner Grant Nicholls, photo/The Press

For five days after the Pike River mine exploded the families of the 29 workers were encouraged to hang on to hope. Repeatedly they were told that their men could be huddled around the end of an air pipe, cold, hungry and wondering when the rescuers were going to arrive. But from the first day of the rescue operation, the experts on the scene had determined that there was no chance of survival. The advice of the Mines Rescue Service was that the men would have been killed instantly by the force of the huge explosion, or overcome within minutes by noxious gases. Mines rescue experts from New South Wales who arrived on the scene to assist formed the same view.

Gas samples from the mine also showed that there was almost certainly a methane fire burning underground by the day after the explosion, and that atmospheric conditions were unsurvivable. Mines Rescue personnel considered there would almost inevitably be a second, more severe, explosion if the oxygen entering the portal and flowing up into the mine was not blocked. They recommended sealing the portal with large doors, while maintaining the flow of compressed air; this would enable any men who might – against all odds – have survived to escape with the use of self-rescue breathing kits

But the Mines Rescue Service was rendered largely impotent during the operation. Despite have a statutory role to maintain equipment, facilities and trained volunteer brigades to respond to explosions and other mine emergencies, they were excluded from the senior command structure of the rescue operation. Within hours of the explosion, the Police had declared themselves to be in charge. Almost all decisions relating to the operation – ranging from drilling bore holes to enable gas sampling, to deciding whether there would be a rescue attempt – where made at Police National Headquarters in Wellington.

“Order had to be brought to a very chaotic situation,” assistant commissioner Grant Nicholls – who was the response co-ordinator of Operation Pike – told the Royal Commission of Inquiry. “Decisive action had to be taken.” To prevent emotion and fatigue affecting the operation, the decision-making process needed to be invested with a degree of “physical and emotional separation”.

“Order” comprised a three-level hierarchy of command, starting with a forward command group at the mine site which developed “risk assessments” on proposed actions, within input from Mines Rescue. These were then sent on to the incident control team run by Superintendent Gary Knowles in Greymouth, who took “expert” advice from lawyers, Pike chief executive Peter Whittall and the Department of Labour. They were then sent up the line to Nicholls in Wellington, where the Fire Service, Department of Labour, academics and other experts were consulted. However, none of these “experts” had any hands-on knowledge of underground coal mining, and Mines Rescue had no input either at Knowles’ incident control team in Greymouth or at police headquarters.

It appears that critical information simply didn’t make it up to the top of the chain of command, where the decisions were being made. Nicholls didn’t know that Mines Rescue personnel believed from very early on that there were no survivors. Nor was he aware of their strong view that the mine should be sealed to prevent a further explosion. Indeed, it was alleged by counsel for the Pike families, Richard Raymond, that the Department of Labour and police forward command at the mine site had “suppressed” discussion about the sealing option.

Police Headquarters was aware by the end of the second day after the explosion that there was a fire in the mine, but Nicholls deferred to Whittall’s explanation that it was merely a “heating”. Nicholls had no knowledge until three days after the first explosion of the existence of CCTV footage from the mine portal showing the full fury of the 52-second explosion. He believed the mine had a “clean room” – a safe haven where the men could have sheltered for as long as five days. In fact there was merely an area at the bottom of the slimline shaft with a rough floor and plastic roller door, where boxes of self-rescuers were kept. He believed the public statement of Pike chairman John Dow that there were enough self-rescuers for the men to have lasted several days, when there were only 108 such kits, each with enough air to last 30-60 minutes.

The families, meanwhile, continued to go to the twice-daily meetings with Whittall and Knowles, where they were encouraged to cling to hope. They were told nothing of the fire in the mine, or of Mines Rescue’s view that no-one could have survived the blast, or that another explosion was a near certainty if the mine was not sealed. Nor were they told that as early as day two after the explosion, police were debating whether the operation was moving from one of rescue of survivors to recovery of bodies.

Even until the final moments before they were given the terrible news, on day five, that there had been a second explosion in which extinguished all hope of survival, they were initially led to believe that Mines Rescue had been togged up and ready to go in just before the blast. But that, too, was misleading; there had been no rescue pending.

UPDATED – 2.00pm

At the end of two days in the witness box, Nicholls was asked by a “surprised” commissioner Stewart Bell – head of mine safety in Queensland – why he had not transferred the role of incident controller to one of the many mining experts who were at Pike during the rescue and recovery operation. “This is what happens in other jurisdictions – Queensland, New South Wales, UK, and US.” Nicholls said he didn’t think a mining person should be appointed as incident controller, even in future disasters.

Bell: “How much time was wasted – maybe that’s the wrong word – training police officers and the Wellington expert panel in mining matters when you could have someone there right from the word go who understood the terminology, understood the risks to a much greater extent?”

Nicholls replied that the expert panel was “not inappropriate”.

Bell: “Why wasn’t there a first class coal ticket person on that expert panel in Wellington?”

Nicholls reply drew mutterings from the family members in the room when he replied that he relied on people such as Auckland University engineering lecturer Dr John St George, but with hindsight it would have been “useful to have such a person”. Bell told Nicholl that he failed to see what the Wellington panel of experts could have known about the technicalities of making the mine inert, when those on the ground at the mine had enormous expertise.

Commission chair Justice Graham Panckhurst put it to Nicholls that, given almost all decisions were made in Wellington, Superintendent Gary Knowles – incident controller in Greymouth, the person supposedly in control if the operation – was “neither one thing nor the other. He didn’t have authority in order to make any of the significant decisions, did he?”

Justice Pankhurst asked if, in the event of future such disasters, operational control should be passed to an agency like Mines Rescue Service – “in order to bring to bear that technical expertise which police cannot possess.”

Nicholls: “Yes I think there is room to explore that, Sir.”