Opinion: Miners’ deaths deserve explanation

18 Dec 2010 11:48p.m.

eugene wrote:

this story is missing the national party had an official mining report concerning safety and showed their anti union anti labour attitude ,used it as fodder in the house.
the greymouth miner on the cover said he can't believe how these MP,S are now grandstanding. national in their arogance
ignored the safety concerns the union raised at greymouth.
28 men died here , national look very bad here . no words can desribe the incompetence of the gov't. eugene

18 Dec 2010 08:32p.m.

Jack wrote:

There is most certainly wyas that this could have been prevented Adele.

Portable Gas chromotograph machines could be used by mining inspectors, inspectors could also form part of the essential mining staff.

This was all detailed in the report that National abandoned and shelved from the mining disaster in the Roa Mine that cost greymouth another two lives in 2006.

It was instituted under labour, and the public submissions process finished three months before labour lost the 2008 General Election which meant they had no chance to push through a law change and have it go through the select comittee process.

However National had this report available to them, but out of sheer laziness they decided not even to read it.... and why? because the process was started by the labour party and should have ended with National pushing through legislative changes when they came into power.

29 deaths later and we still arent any closer to a resolution of the Roa mining disaster and now have to deal with the Pike River Mine disaster.

if anyone is to blame here, it would the National party Minister in charge of Energy and Mining, for being too lazy to read over a report he knew existed... how did he know it existed? well the Roa disaster was advertised on National news programmes as was the inquiry and as was the Public submission process.

National have no excuse for the 29 deaths they caused as a result of brownlies sheer laziness.

16 Dec 2010 08:33a.m.

Concerned wrote:

The story above by Eugene Bingham bears little resemblance factually to the actual way it was portrayed by "60 minutes". It would have been easy to interpret emphases was placed firmly on the incompetence of mine management and design rather than any one or more naturally occurring and perhaps escalating circumstance.
One may never completely know or understand the exact course of events leading to this misfortune as most likely any physical evidence would now be long erased by consecutive happenings .

16 Dec 2010 08:32a.m.

Sceptic wrote:

I would have expected a producer to be better informed. Geoscience has produced high grade coal in laboratory conditions in a matter of days and has shown that coal is not necessarily a 'fossil' fuel and in fact is more likely to be formed from a similar geochemical process that creates oil. The systematically preached 'fossil fuel' the green crowd constantly screams from their trees ignores scientific fact.

16 Dec 2010 08:11a.m.

penny wrote:

It will have to be studied for lessons to be learned, and it is unbearable for the communities to lose such a number in one incident, but mining is not the only dangerous activity where disasters happen. Think about this: It was the same number of deaths as we had for just 2 weekends of road toll, labour weekend and the following weekend- we dont seem to be able to learn and prevent road deaths either. Surely they were forseeable and preventable?

15 Dec 2010 06:41p.m.

Adele Etheridge wrote:

It is unbelievable after 150 years and many of these disasters that there has been nothing learnt from the tragedies...I can not accept that this disaster was not foreseeable or preventable.