Vol. 75/No. 37      October 17, 2011

This is the picture of the Pike River mine that is emerging in the course of the current Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Nov. 19, 2010, disaster in which 29 miners were killed in a series of methane gas explosions.

Located on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, the mine began producing coal in mid-2009 after many delays. Rising international prices for coking coal generated expectations among capitalists of a profit bonanza. It is now sealed with the bodies of 29 miners trapped inside.

Testifying on September 5, miner Daniel Rockhouse—one of two survivors working underground at the time of blasts—explained how the explosion knocked him semiconscious. He followed advice to go to a fresh air base where he found no fresh air. The supposedly sealed door was open. The air vent and phone were inoperative. Half-overcome by poisonous fumes, Rockhouse and Russell White fought their way to the surface.

Mine manager Douglas White told the inquiry that the base had been decommissioned several weeks earlier. Its replacement was weeks away, he said.

Discussing broader problems of safety and working conditions, Rockhouse noted that smoke lines, which are supposed to guide workers in the event of a disaster, were broken or nonexistent.

The one official emergency exit required a 100 meter-plus climb (328 feet) up a vertical ventilation shaft. No evacuation drill was ever organized. Escape up the shaft would be “difficult under normal circumstances, but in the event of fire would … become virtually impossible,” stated a safety audit report in 2009.

The existence of only one entry road into the mine was “madness,” testified former mine inspector Harry Bell.

Engineer Mark Smith said the company had pushed to get coal out early for “cash reasons” and to test out its hydraulic coal mining equipment.

The incident highlights a decline in safety standards in the mining industry, which employs around 1,000 people nationwide. In the early 1990s, the government made changes to mine safety regulations, which included dissolving the mines inspectorate into the Labour Department and abolishing check inspectors, who were union workers chosen by their peers to check safety conditions in the mines.

In August the government announced that it will double the number of mining inspectors from two to four.

“It has taken the Pike River incident for something like this to happen,” Valma McGowan, whose husband Robert was killed in the Black Reef mine in 2006, told the Militant.

“We’re paying a price” for the elimination of the worker-inspectors, said Trevor Bolderson, a miner at Spring Creek and local union president for the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union. “The price is 29 still underground.”
 
 
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