close
MENU
Hot Topic EARNINGS
Hot Topic EARNINGS
5 mins to read

Double dealing in America’s Pike River disaster


Thu, 30 Jun 2011

The US government’s inquiry into its equivalent of the Pike River coal mine disaster has blamed the company for poor safety practices and keeping two sets of books.

Some 29 miners – the same as Pike River – were killed in the April 2010 explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. It was the worst US coal-mining disaster in 40 years and the Labor Department’s investigation involved 1060 pieces of physical evidence, 23,000 photographs and 84,000 documents.

The official leading the inquiry, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, said the disaster could have been prevented if the company had maintained water sprays and prevented the coal-dust buildup. The faulty sprays failed to put out an initial spark from the cutting machine that ignited methane gas and triggered the explosion.

[The official] also cited examples of faulty mine examinations and problematic record keeping by Massey, including two sets of safety records. One "production and maintenance" book contained hazards such as poor ventilation that didn't appear in an "official" book that was shown to government inspectors. The official examination book is also used by miners beginning a shift.

As nothing like this explanation has emerged so far in the Pike River saga and its aftermath, it can only be surmised whether the local inquiry will be anything like as robust as the American one. Another parallel is that Massey has sold the mine to another company for $US7.1 billion. It was not told of the “two books” and Massey’s own inquiry found coal-dust did not play a major role. It blamed the explosion of “an inundation of natural gas.”

Flotilla boosts Israel’s case
In a turnaround from the usual, Israel is winning the propaganda war over a second flotilla aimed at breaking the arms blockade of Gaza. News reports from Greece say the 10-strong fleet has failed to sail as planned and is tied up in red tape, safety fears and threats of withdrawn insurance. Instead of a touted 1500 activists, only 350 have showed up amid warnings from the US and other countries that taking part could be dangerous and career-limiting (Israel says it will ban embedded journalists for 10 years).

Commentators from across the spectrum have turned on the flotilla and its purpose. Take Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent:

I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?

What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no one on the MV Saoirse could possibly maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years…

Others include British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson and feminist academic Professor Phyllis Chesler. The crunch issue is that support for Gaza means backing Hamas, Syria and Iran – all enemies of the west and ruthless opponents of freedom and democracy.

Meanwhile, western journalists who have visited Gaza lately report a building boom. The New York Times reports:

Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall – with escalators imported from Israel– will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up.

Reuters has this Q&A on the legal issues.

One-eyed on Fiji
The Nation’s Sean Plunket excelled in his interview of Fijian attorney general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. Not only was the subject erudite and allowed to have his say at length, the interview shed light on issues that get no traction in the media outside Fiji.

Understandably, the interview focused on human rights, censorship and other unpalatable elements of military rule. So it was disappointing Mr Plunket’s questions missed the opportunity to explain more fundamental changes that are going on, particularly in the economic sphere. Mr Sayed-Khaiyum explains:

Many of the issues that we are now dealing with or changing have been politicised over a number of years, and if anybody who understood Fijian history for example, if you compare ourselves with Mauritius, we were on the same platform on par regarding the sugar industry. We have now sort of just stagnated whereas Mauritius has taken off, because they have in fact taken a very commercial approach, whereas in Fiji sugar has been politicised.

That was all we heard, as Mr Plunket returned to discussing media freedom. History is full of lessons that a ballot means little if the social and economic environment is skewed. For example, General Pinochet’s Chile was no place for liberals or dissenters but his economic changes enabled democracy to take root once a strong free enterprise economy emerged.

Francis Fukuyama and others have written extensively on the transition to democracy from authoritarian and tribal societies (Fiji has a constitution written by New Zealanders to favour a race-based system). By contrast, democratic capitalist societies need property rights and economic freedom to achieve high rates of growth, in turn leading (as Chile found) to strong civil institutions and government.

Mr Sayed-Khaiyum gives the impression this is route Fiji wants to follow:

If you look at what's happening around the country in terms of opening up the land that’s available for development, in terms of desegregating various communal issues from governance issues, they're very very fundamental, they cannot be politicised.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything worth reading that backgrounds these issues or provides hope the issues between Fiji and its biggest neighbours, New Zealand and Australia, will be resolved any time soon.

Medicines for all
Members of Parliament are seldom recognised for the amount of bi-partisan work they do for the benefit of all, so I am pleased to report in the area of prescription medicines a large amount of agreement exists.

This has led to considerable progress on a number of fronts, from the recent report on clinical trials through to the liberalisation of Pharmac policies on rare disorders.
I chaired a panel discussion with representatives from five political parties to an audience invited by Medicines New Zealand, the pharmaceutical drugs industry body.

The industry is wrongly viewed as anti-Pharmac and gets plenty of bad and ill-informed publicity. So it was encouraging to see praise from a man who once ran the AIDS foundation. Green MP Kevin Hague, who is also a former CEO of the Westland District Health Board, congratulated the industry’s role in the 30 years since HIV was identified.

The Economist marked the anniversary with a cover story and editorial. While the war against AIDS is far from over in the Third World, the magazine noted that on May 12 the HIV Prevention Trials Network – a remarkable international research collaboration between drug companies and public health authorities – was terminated because it had succeeded in its task of developing effective treatments.

© All content copyright NBR. Do not reproduce in any form without permission, even if you have a paid subscription.
Double dealing in America’s Pike River disaster
15611
false