The news of an explosion deep in Grey Valley on the West Coast hit New Zealand with a collective thud. The nation was still reeling from the first Canterbury earthquakes, only two months prior; a tragedy of this scale seemed too cruel to be true.
As details emerged, there was hope that the 29 men trapped down the 2.3 kilometre mine shaft at Pike River would emerge alive, mirroring the triumphant rescue seen in Chile months prior. For the next five days, the men’s families and the small, close-knit community in Greymouth would endure a hellish wait, hoping desperately for good news while watching the chances of a successful rescue dim with each hour.
In the haze that followed the explosion, the nation’s attention focused solely on whether or not the 29 miners were alive. Only a handful of people were asking how the explosion had happened. “All of my senses were telling me that this sort of thing was not an accident,” recalls journalist Rebecca Macfie, author of Tragedy at Pike River Mine. “You don’t get mass calamities in an industrial context like this just because one person made one mistake one day. It’s going to have to be a sequence of events or a failure of systems on a massive scale.”
Photo: Jane Ussher/NZ Listener
In November 2010, at the time of the Pike explosion, Macfie was a staff journalist for New Zealand’s Listener magazine. Rather than going to the Coast to join the media scrum waiting to hear of the men’s fate, Macfie remained in Christchurch to look into Pike River Coal, a relatively new name in the industry. As the days passed, another blast firmly discounted hope of the 29 men walking out alive, Macfie began to put together a picture of the company behind the disaster.
“After a catastrophe, there’s this unique opportunity to see inside an organisation in a way that you can’t when it’s operating…You don’t have access to internal documents and you can’t OIA a company; if you try to interview 100 people who work in an operation, the shutters are going to come down on you pretty damn quickly,” she says.
When Pike River Coal was formed in 1982, there were big expectations as to the mine’s potential; it was anticipated to be New Zealand’s second-largest export coalmine, producing between one and 1.4 million tonnes of coking coal each year. It was expected to reinvigorate the struggling West Coast and provide a healthy return to shareholders by leveraging off the high demand for coal in China.
In Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Macfie traces the many murmurs of doubt being made about the company in these early days. As well as continued hurdles in raising the necessary capital to start mining, expert geologists doubted the quality and therefore profitability of the coal, as well as the company’s understanding of the risks involved – and management’s blind insistence on continuing irrespective of those concerns sent up red flags early on. Wilful ignorance would become a marker of the company right up until – and even after – the fatal explosions years later.
If the 2.3km entry to the mine was blocked, the only way out was through the ventilation shaft – deemed in a 2009 audit to be an “extremely difficult” escape route.
The early years of Pike River Coal were marked by what Macfie describes as a steady stream of setbacks. Getting the coal out proved a lot more difficult than management had hoped. The initial prospectus given to potential investors predicted that the mine would be producing coal by March 2008, and that by 2009, production would have reached a million tonnes per year – but the first shipment of coal, in February 2010, was just 20,000 tonnes. The mine’s ventilation shaft collapsed; there were multiple instances of methane igniting inside the mine; and there was a high turnover of management.
Despite such serious setbacks and the immense financial pressure, Pike River Coal kept up the bravado. In January 2009, a year before the pitiful 20,000-tonne shipment, Minister of Conservation Tim Grosser visited Pike and called the mine a “showcase of modern mining”. Less than two years later, the mine would be in receivership, and sealed with the bodies of 29 men inside.
Pike River’s over-promising and under-delivering is core to Macfie’s narrative. When a company is under acute pressure to live up to its own over-inflated promises after woefully under-performing and facing setback after setback, bad news isn’t welcome news. Macfie details countless examples of where Peter Whittall, Pike River Coal’s general manager, and his board of directors simply turned a blind eye to safety concerns.
The most oft-raised issue was the lack of a second exit. If the 2.3km entry to the mine was blocked, the only way out was through the ventilation shaft – deemed in a 2009 audit to be an “extremely difficult” escape route, and “virtually impossible” in the event of a fire. Those pushing for action on the issue said it would be like “trying to escape a house fire by climbing out the chimney”, says Macfie.
She believes the lack of a second exit means Pike River Mine should not have been operating in November 2010. But the cost of building one, and the Department of Labour’s lax and under-resourced safety inspection regime, meant it was simply not a priority for the company.
The image Macfie paints of Pike River Coal is of conditions perfect for mass calamity. The company’s default was to shut down concerns in blind pursuit of unrealistic financial outcomes, and the Department of Labour regulator was nothing more than a limp box-ticker, lacking the capacity and oversight to ensure workers’ safety. “Pike River was mine was awash with information foretelling catastrophe,” Macfie writes in the book. “But all of those who had the power to act on the warning signs were deaf and blind to them.”
In November 2011, a year after the fatal explosion, it was announced that, in addition to the Royal Commission inquiry, the Department of Labour would be laying charges against Peter Whittall, as well as Pike River Coal Ltd and the in-seam drilling contractor Valley Longwall International, all for breaches of the Health and Safety in Employment Act.
Photo: Solid Energy
For many, the charges against Whittall came as a particular surprise. Earlier that year, he had ranked among Readers Digest’s 100 Most Trusted New Zealanders. In late 2010, Herald readers nominated him for New Zealander of the Year. In those first, desperate few days after the explosion, Whittall was heralded for his handling of the media – and perceived, by both the public and many of the miners’ families, as himself a victim of what was then thought to have been a freak accident.
However, despite experts’ advice to the contrary, Whittall continued to keep hopes of a rescue alive for the five days between the first and second explosions. Macfie is unsure whether or not Whittall truly believed the men could have survived the first blast, despite his knowledge of the mine’s architecture.
“I’ve expended a huge amount of energy trying to find an answer to that question,” Macfie says. “Was he deluded or was he simply lying? I don’t know.”
The Royal Commission into Pike River Mine published its findings in October 2012. It found the explosions to be a result of actions or inactions by the company, the Department of Labour, and the board of directors. “In the drive towards coal production the directors and executive managers paid insufficient attention to health and safety and exposed the company’s workers to unacceptable risks,” it concluded. “The Department of Labour did not have the focus, capacity or strategies to ensure that Pike was meeting its legal responsibilities under health and safety laws. The department assumed that Pike was complying with the law, even though there was ample evidence to the contrary.”
Photo: Solid Energy
Macfie writes that the Royal Commission’s findings brought “relief but not resolution”. What remained to be seen was who would be held accountable, and attention turned to the Department of Labour’s prosecutions. Valley Longwall pleaded guilty and were fined just under $50,000; Whittall pleaded not guilty; and the company, now in the hands of receivers, didn’t even make an appearance to plead.
District Court Judge Farish found against the company, citing “a systematic failure of the company to implement and audit its own (inadequate) safety plans and procedures”. She ordered the company pay $3.4 million in reparation to the victims’ families, and imposed a fine of $760,000 for multiple breaches of the law – well aware that any punishment she handed down to the company would be all but meaningless, given the company’s limited funds and that it owed a number of creditors. For the families, who desperately wanted to see someone held responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, it was yet another cruel blow.
When Macfie’s book was published in November 2013, the hopes of someone being held to account for the tragedy rested on the charges against Whittall, for whom a trial was scheduled for some time in 2014. In December last year, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (which had replaced the Department of Labour) announced that it had dropped all 12 charges against him. “I was astonished,” says Macfie. “I still struggle to accept it.”
Details emerged that one of the factors that had led to MBIE dropping the charges was a deal by which the $3.4 million in compensation owed to the families would be paid by the directors’ insurance. “There clearly was a deal, that’s there in black and white,” Macfie says. “If you look at the memorandum for the court, the money was offered on the condition that the charges were dropped.”
Calamity strikes and 29 people die, and nothing happens. There is no consequence. That’s where we’re at now in the Pike saga.
MBIE says that Whittall’s offer was a relatively minor factor in their decision to withdraw the charges. Macfie says MBIE was advised that there was sufficient evidence to possibly get a conviction, but that it failed to meet the “public interest” test, which factors in the severity of the sentence if a guilty verdict is reached. In this case, the most likely outcome would have been a relatively light financial fine and no custodial sentence. The fact that relatively minor charges carrying a light sentence had been laid against Whittall became a perverse justification for dropping the changes.
“What’s not addressed in all of this is at what point we as a community need to see a personal accountability for a totally preventable calamity,” Macfie says. “We end up with the decision being made with no account being taken of the larger picture: that it leaves the community with the impression you can run a completely shabby operation for a long period of time and put men at risk day after day, and eventually kill them all by having such an inadequately designed complex, with inadequate management of risk, and inadequate detection and mitigation of risk – not even a way out; you can do all of this, and then calamity strikes and 29 people die, and nothing happens. There is no consequence. That’s where we’re at now in the Pike saga.”
Pike has also taken its toll on Macfie. She’s been investigating this story for over three years now; remaining in touch with the people who shared stories of their loved ones; the men who died are more than just names and headshots. For her, “they were people, real people. I wanted to get to get to know them”.
She mentions Milton Osbourne, a 54-year-old miner and volunteer firefighter from Ngahere who died in the disaster.
“What was he like? Well, actually, he was a great guy!” She laughs fondly, as if she’s remembering an old friend. “Sure, he wasn’t perfect, but he was a great member of his community, obviously a great father, and he was hard-working. You start to get a sense of the texture of the people who are now dead.” She pauses and reflects. “I think it’s important we do that – putting some ordinary flesh on people who otherwise are just a name who obtains victim status.”
Pike River, reentry project Photo: Solid Energy.
The focus is now on the potential re-entry into the mine access tunnel, planned for June this year. It is hoped that this will yield precious information, and some believe it is possible that some of the men who were close to finishing their shift when the mine exploded may be found. The Council of Trade Unions has filed for a judicial review of MBIE’s decision to drop the charges against Whittall, but even if this is successful, it will simply require MBIE to reconsider a case against Whittall, not to resume it. In all likelihood, it would reach the same decision again.
The findings of the Royal Commission, a coronial inquest and Macfie’s book are consistent: all 29 deaths were preventable and a result of clear failures by the company, governance board and Department of Labour. But the victims’ families, and this small West Coast community, are still waiting – for the bodies of their loved ones to be recovered, for an apology, and for some person or entity to truly be held accountable for a disaster that never should have happened.
Rebecca Macfie will be speaking at the Auckland Writers Festival, cover photo was taken from the AWF website.
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