Tragedy at Pike River Mine by Rebecca Macfie

Author:Rebecca Macfie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Who Will Say Stop?

It was almost two decades since Harry Bell, then chief inspector of coal mines, had brought his regulatory authority to bear at the Huntly West underground mine. In September 1992 he had ordered the place shut, thus saving the lives of dozens of workers when it exploded three days later.

In the intervening period, the skilled and robust inspectorate that Bell had served for 15 years and led for two had been all but destroyed. By November 2010, underground coal mines such as Pike River were effectively left to run their operations however they chose, provided they were seen to work within the vague and elastic framework of rules that had emerged from a tsunami of deregulation in the early 1990s.

As a young regional inspector overseeing the underground mines of the West Coast in the 1970s and 1980s, Bell had been under an obligation to visit large gassy underground coal mines weekly and smaller mines monthly. His job was to ensure compliance with the 1979 Coal Mines Act, a prescriptive and detailed rulebook written in the blood of miners killed at Strongman, Dobson, Brunner and other miners’ graveyards over a century of coalmining in New Zealand.

At every inspection Bell would first look at the gas book, in which mine officials were obliged to record every instance of methane detected. (The gas book was also the first point of daily reference for a mine manager.) Bell would then walk through the mine and talk to the workers, the workmen’s safety inspector and the mine manager. He’d take his own gas readings, inspect stoppings, and assess ventilation. If a mine was struggling with a problem, he would suggest solutions based on his decades of experience as a miner, manager and regulator.

If an application to develop a new coal mine in his district was lodged, the document would be sent to him for detailed review. As well as checking the technical viability of the application – the proposed ventilation system, the method of extraction, and so on – he would look into the developer’s financial credibility. It was well understood that if a company attempted to mine on the basis of inadequate exploration or flawed methodology, or ran short of money and took safety shortcuts to win coal, there was a high chance things would go tragically wrong.1

But by the time New Zealand Oil & Gas applied for a licence to develop an underground coal mine at Pike River in 1996, the mining inspectorate was in the process of being dismembered. It had no say at all in whether NZOG’s scanty 28-page application ought to be granted. That role had become the sole preserve of a unit of government called Crown Minerals. And Crown Minerals had no interest in whether Pike’s proposal was technically sound, financially viable or safe; it called for no information on its capital requirements or expected profitability.2

Had NZOG’s application for a permit to mine at Pike River come across Bell’s desk when he was an inspector, he’d

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