By Eugene Bingham - 60 Minutes producer
In the formation of coal, a crucial element is pressure. Plant remains, squeezed by the earth, harden and chemically alter into the black lumps we humans have used as an energy source for thousands of years.
Without that pressure, there would be no coal. And when you look around the West Coast, you realise that the communities would not be what they are without coal.
Pressure, pressure, pressure. It was something we constantly had to be aware of as we put together our story, Blood on the Coal, about the Pike River mining disaster.
The West Coast is a community under extraordinary pressure. The loss of 29 men is a catastrophic blow. And the financial collapse of the company is a further torpedo.
If there’s one thing they have on the coast, it’s solidarity, bound by overwhelming adversity and grief, and the determination to get through this together.
So it was no wonder people found it hard to talk to us – on camera - about what had gone on down the mine prior to November 19.
It’s not that they had nothing to say.
You’ll have seen in the programme the allegations we aired – questions about procedures to contain explosive coal dust; ignitions underground; tracking devices that didn’t work; complaints about the escape route; a gas evacuation three weeks before the explosion.
A member of the mines rescue team spoke out too, poignantly asking, “Why is there blood on the coal again?”
We were grateful to all the people who talked to us, even those who felt under such pressure they had to pull out of on-camera interviews.
One such miner had been on the day shift and left hours before the explosion. Over the phone, he told us that there was nothing out of the ordinary that day. There were gas issues at the mine, he said, but they were managed. And if there were safety concerns, they weren’t enough to stop anyone going to work.
Another man who pulled out of an interview was a deputy – a senior mining supervisor position – with more than 30 years experience around the world. He told us that at one point he shut the mine down because inexperienced operators were doing work they shouldn’t have. He’d received a message from a fellow former deputy saying, “We knew this was only a matter of time”.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and no one wants a witch hunt. But there are questions that need answering.
In a chilling portent Pike River CEO Peter Whittall said in 2008: “We all have 20:20 vision after an event, but very few people generally intend to harm anyone."
In our interview for 60 Minutes reporter Paula Penfold asked him if that was what it felt like now.
“It’s the same question as: Are all accidents preventable?” Whittall told Penfold. “If they are, no one would ever stub their toe because after you’ve had the accident or incident, you go back and look at all the chain of events and you would not do one of the things in that chain of events and you would prevent the accident. Does that mean that every accident is foreseeable and can you completely risk assess out human interaction or human behaviour? That’s pretty hard.”
As to what could possibly have happened, he alluded to a raft of possible human errors underground that day, but agreed in an interesting exchange with Penfold during our interview that it could have been a failure of the ventilation or monitoring or other systems. You can see that part of the interview in this link.
In our story you’ll have seen two former Pike River miners who left for jobs working in Australia within the last few months.
They came under extraordinary pressure not to speak to us, but in the end decided they would because they wanted to talk to us about the camaraderie and brotherhood of mining.
They also wanted to impress upon us how much they believed Pike River had been committed to training.
“They really emphasised on the safety aspect of the mine at Pike, they really drilled that into us, eh,” said one of the men. “We had the right training – that’s the one thing Pike River did, they trained us very well. And we had good men behind us.”
Theirs were voices which needed to be heard in the story, so we were grateful they agreed to be interviewed.
As much as anything, meeting them gave us a sense of the men underground that day: hard-working, straight-up, good blokes.
Blokes whose deaths deserve an explanation.