Pike River footage public ‘too soon’

Some families of the 29 Pike River mine disaster victims may not have had a chance to see footage from inside the mine’s drift before police released it to the public.

Police released more than 13 hours of video footage to the public – which was taken by a Western Australia Water Corporation robot that entered the mine’s drift on March 15, 2011 – yesterday morning. A November 2010 explosion in the West Coast mine killed 29 men. Their bodies remain in the mine.

Anna Osbourne, whose husband Milton died in the disaster, said police released the footage on a ‘‘secure website’’ for them late yesterday evening, but that did not allow enough time to alert all the families involved.

‘‘There are families who are overseas who might not have had a chance to view it,’’ she said.

‘‘It was released [to us] on such short notice before it was made public.’’

The footage is of the fourth robot drift entry and Osbourne said it showed about 700 metres in, as far as Russell Smith’s loader.

In a Stand with Pike media release, Sonya Rockhouse, whose son, Ben, died in the mine, said her Official Information Act (OIA) request for the full 265 gigabytes of footage and documents held

"We've asked for the footage, we've asked for the open boreholes to be reexamined with modern cameras . . .'' Anna Osbourne

by police was ‘‘not too much to ask’’ after six-and-a-half years of waiting for answers.

‘‘We need to know what the Government knows,’’ she said

Osbourne said the families were more interested in seeing images from the boreholes.

‘‘We’ve asked for the footage, we’ve asked for the open boreholes to be reexamined with modern cameras, we’ve asked for the Government to sit down with our experts and make their case for re-entering the drift tunnel to recover bodies and evidence and each time we’ve been fobbed of.’’

Police deputy commissioner Mike Clement said excerpts of this video were shown at family meetings in July 2011.

‘‘The release of this video is in response to a number of requests, including OIA requests from the families and media. Police is currently working through the remaining aspects of these various requests, which involves a large amount of imagery and video stored in different data formats and locations,’’ he said.

Police had been ‘‘absolutely committed to transparency’’ with miners’ families and no information had been deliberately withheld, Clement said.

‘‘Police [are] also mindful of [their] privacy obligations regarding individuals who appear on many still images, as well as suppression of some material by the Royal Commission of Inquiry, before we can publicly release the remaining material held. We are working to do this as quickly as we can.’’

Up to eight hours of video footage from multiple sources was shown at meetings, where approximately 25 direct family members attended, on July 23 and 24, 2011 in Greymouth and Christchurch.

Clement said the meeting included showing some video that had already been played at previous meetings, as well as more recent footage, including some from the March 15, 2011, robot entry.

‘‘Police [have] also been working through historic records to determine what information held by police was made available to the Royal Commission of Inquiry. We can confirm that the entire video from the fourth robot was released by police to the Royal Commission of Inquiry in August 2011,’’ he said.