Cabinet will today sign off a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Pike River mine explosions that killed 29 men, and its report will almost certainly reach conclusions that will have an impact on mine safety in New Zealand.Prime Minister John Key says it
Cabinet will today sign off a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Pike River mine explosions that killed 29 men, and its report will almost certainly reach conclusions that will have an impact on mine safety in New Zealand.
Prime Minister John Key says it will have "absolute powers" and its terms of reference will be very broad. It will be headed by a judge and is expected to include an Australian mine safety expert.
The commission will have to find out why those 29 men walked into the mine when the level of methane gas in part of it must have been close to the level where it could ignite, or was already above that level.
It will have to find out what went wrong with the gas detection systems and there doesn't seem to be more than three possible answers -- if they were working they were either lethally inadequate or weren't being monitored. If they weren't working, that should have been known and the mine should have been closed until they were.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, those 29 men had no idea when they walked into the mine that they weren't going to walk out of it.
Pike River Coal chief executive Peter Whittall has described a range of different types of monitoring equipment used in the mine -- hand-held devices, machinery shut-down precautions and 24/7 monitoring in parts of it -- all of which appear to have been in use.
The point remains. They didn't prevent the explosions killing 29 men, so something went dreadfully wrong.
The way the rescue operation was conducted has already been under intense scrutiny. Judgement calls were made that it was too dangerous to go into the mine, which seem to have been vindicated by the three subsequent explosions.
But there seemed to be a strange lack of urgency during the 24 hours after the first explosion, which led to questions about whether those in charge of it believed from the start there was no hope for the men inside the mine. That was vigorously rejected by the authorities who insisted they were involved in a rescue and not a recovery operation.
Frustration overload was apparent among the families of the lost men and some of them went to the media with their concerns.
They wanted to know why it took so long to start drilling the hole into the mine that would allow the atmosphere to be tested deep inside it.
The army robot that was sent into the entry shaft wasn't the right machine for the job, its electrical systems failed when water got into them.
A second robot, better suited to the task, was sent for and arrived some time later.
The Australian government quickly offered any assistance that was needed but the jet engine that can blast inert gas into the mine and render methane harmless doesn't appear to have been requested until after the second explosion, when it was announced all hope for the men had been lost.
The CCTV pictures of gas and dust blasting out the mine entrance immediately after the first explosion, vivid evidence of the power of it, must have been quickly accessed by those in charge of the rescue but it wasn't shown to anyone else for several days.
The explanation was that it "wasn't relevant" to the rescue. Perhaps it was held back because it would have further distressed the families but no convincing answer has so far been given.
Former journalist and mine disaster historian Gerry Morris told NZPA there was little useful information provided to the families before the second explosion.
"All the evidence was that the men had perished. It would have been impossible for the men to survive the force of a methane-fuelled explosion, the fireball that followed, then the suffocating smoke and poisonous carbon monoxide," he said.
When Parliament paid tribute to the men on Thursday, MPs were reluctant to raise questions about the safety of the mine while grief-stricken families were still dealing with the news of the second explosion.
Peter Dunne said it was a tragedy that shouldn't have happened, and Progressive Party leader Jim Anderton urged Parliament to refuse to accept that any deaths were a necessary cost of mining.
"Pike River is a modern, state-of-the-art mine with presumably all the latest technology, but that didn't save the lives of the 29 men," he said.
During the next few weeks politicians will have a very sharp focus on the need to find out what went wrong.
Key knows that and is staying a step ahead of them.
The terms of reference for the Royal Commission of Inquiry will be wide enough to cover everything that needs to be discovered.
Green Party co-leader Russel Norman is suggesting an inquiry in two parts -- the first to find out what went wrong and why, for the sake of the families, and then the wider ramifications for the mining industry.
He is making sense. The inquiry will take many months, possibly more than a year, and that is too long for the families to wait to find out why their men perished.
