No Pike River entry yet
Unknown reading of oxygen means a delay of weeks or even months possible
Families of the 29 men who died in the Pike River mine are disappointed by an eleventh-hour delay to today’s re-entry operation but accept safety must come first.
Expert miners were due to enter the West Coast mine this morning in a long-awaited bid to try to recover the 29 men killed during the November 19, 2010 disaster.
The Pike River Recovery Agency (PRRA) has been working for months to purge methane and oxygen from the mine by pumping in nitrogen before they were to head underground.
But on Wednesday, they got an “unknown reading of oxygen” from a borehole 2.3km into the mine’s drift, where the roof collapsed in the 2010 explosions.
The oxygen had the potential for a “spontaneous combustion event”.
Pike River Recovery Minister Andrew Little made the shock announcement yesterday afternoon.
“Yesterday, unexpected and unexplained readings were reported by the atmospheric monitoring systems in the Pike River mine, leading to reentry operations being suspended,” he said.
Tactical action response plans meant they had to immediately shut down operations and find out the cause of the oxygen leak before they can carry on.
The delay could last days, even weeks, but PRRA bosses say they will
“definitely” still go into the mine.
Anna Osborne, chairwoman for the Pike River Family Reference Group and whose husband Milton died in the tragedy, said the families would be disappointed.
She is “slightly” disappointed too, but was glad that the agency was putting the health and safety of the men going back into the mine first.
It’s not a showstopper, she said, and once the issues are investigated, “it will be back on”.
Pike River Recovery Agency chief operating officer Dinghy Pattinson denied it was a tough call to delay the re-entry, because they have also stressed a safety-first attitude. “It was an easy decision to make,” said Pattinson, who was due to lead a three-man team of miners back into the mine today.
If the oxygen was ignored, he said, then a “spontaneous combustion event” could have resulted — something different to an explosion.
Experts started breaching the concrete seal plugging the mine’s entrance this week. They discovered the elevated oxygen levels on Wednesday. The cause could be as simple as a damaged tube in a borehole, Pattinson said, but they need to go through a process of elimination which will last “however long it takes”.
“We’ve got the readings. We have an issue. We’re going to sort through that issue,” he said. “At the moment, the mine is full of nitrogen, so nothing can happen. As it is now, the mine is stable.”
PRRA chief executive Dave Gawn said it was unhelpful to speculate on how long the operation would be delayed.
Osborne said Pike River “played Russian roulette with the men” and the PRRA won’t be doing that, saying she is proud of all the work the agency has done.
“This is only a hiccup. They are working very hard to correct this,” she said.
She is almost positive that the reentry will go ahead soon but only when everyone is safe. “That’s what we want.”
Osborne said the cost of the reentry operation shouldn’t come into it, as 29 men died in the mine “through no fault of their own — so what cost do you put on a life?”
It was not just about the Pike 29, she said, but about changing the working culture in New Zealand. “This country owes our men and the rest of New Zealand a better and safer working environment,” she said.
A service at the mine’s entrance will still go ahead, Gawn said, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern expected to attend along with several families, some travelling from overseas.
“The breaching operation has started, and we still have a way ahead. So absolutely, we’re going to celebrate this,” Gawn said.
The re-entry into the mine’s drift was scheduled for today, with Little, Ardern, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, Green Party co-leader James Shaw and National Party Pike River spokesman Mark Mitchell set to attend.
The elevated readings meant that the atmosphere in the drift has changed and the air is not breathable.