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Pike River mine disaster

gumboot said:
I agree. My disgust at the NZ media increases daily, to be honest. Although I suppose it's only the natural pattern for all media covering a disaster:

Day 1 - 2: coverage focuses on the disaster itself, the spectacle, rescue teams, response, etc

Day 3 - 4: Focus on "human stories" - the personal tales of tragedy

Day 5 onwards: time to start stirring the pot by playing the blame game. Who caused the disaster? Who should have prevented it? Why didn't authorities respond faster? Why didn't they respond better? Find dissenting voices amongst the crowd who, strung out with emotion and stress, will say something imflammatory.

Adjusting the timeline as appropriate, you could apply this exact same model to virtually any disaster ever. It's disgusting.
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...it was a couple of Australian journalists who asked two of the dumbest questions today:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/ne...isaster/4380806/Boorish-journalist-infuriates

A quick search on Ean Higgins shows that he has been involved in at least a couple of other incidents in his journalism career. What a horrible man. Or, to quote Brownlee today, an "utter tosspot."
 
gumboot said:
Coal seam fires can continue to burn for decades and decades, even fully buried - the naturally burning coal seam at Burning Mountain in Australia is thought to have been burning for 6,000 years.
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As an aside, I'd never heard of Burning Mountain so fired up Google to get some info. Very interesting. Also interesting is that the second hit I got was from Answers in Genesis which claims that Burning Mountain is a challenge to evolution. It is a fun read, in a perverse sort of way.
 
InfidelSavant said:
Given that there's just been news of a second explosion and experts are saying there's no way there's anybody alive, well...
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Yes, that's what I just heard on ABC radio as well. Very sad news, but it does perfectly illustrate why no-one was sent in to rescue them, the risk unfortunately was just way too high.:(
 
With the second larger explosion today, all 29 of the missing miners are now presumed dead. We may never know if any survived the original blast, though in the cold hard light of day the data currently available suggests this is highly unlikely.

Now we can only hope that conditions settle enough to recover the bodies, although even this may be a futile hope.

The government has ordered all flags to be flown at half mast tomorrow in an expression of the scale of this tragedy. 29 men may seem a small toll, with the staggering death tolls we hear from Chinese mines on a regular basis, but consider; we are a very small close-knit nation, and this loss is devastating.

It's the equivalent of over 2,000 miners lost in a single explosion in the USA.
It's the equivalent of nearly 100,000 miners lost in a single explosion in China.

Perhaps those numbers help to illustrate just how horrific a loss this is. Think then, how great the loss is in Greymouth and surrounding areas - a small town in a small country.
 
I know one shouldn't consider nationality at a time like this, but it's hit hard here particularly because two of the miners were Scottish.

Rolfe.
 
lionking said:
I've been following it and have been desperately sad about the whole thing.

Okay, I'm going to say it and no doubt be damned. There was no collapse and the passage way to the mine seemed clear (please correct me if this is not correct). But rescue workers were not sent down in case of the danger caused by a possible explosion. Sure, safety of rescuers is extremely important, but at the expense of doing nothing? The first responders at 9/11 would have done nothing based on this set of criteria.

Someone should have gone in the mine.
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Honestly, they couldn't. At very, very, best they had a short window of maybe an hour just after the explosion, and those guys were 2.5 km or more down the tunnels. No one could realistically get to them in time and get them out if there were any survivors from the initial explosion. The reality was that this was more likely to be a recovery mission, not a rescue mission, right from the start.

This wasn't a gold or copper mine, this was a coal mine. I was told it was coking coal which is the worst to deal with. What the scenario was is that methane if it's less than 5% it's fine, it's not going to explode. The same if it's over 15-20%, too dense to explode. It was a matter of when there was going to be another explosion, not if. It was way too risky to send in 111 rescuers into a situation where another explosion could happen any moment and have more victims, and as we know today it did. They didn't even know exactly where the explosion occurred, and there's all the other issues such as the terrain as mentioned. The media haven't helped, plenty of dumb questions there. A reporter asked the guy leading the rescue team "can't you just send down just one brave man?" or something along that line. The guy replied "I've got 30 brave men that would go down, but I'm not prepared to sacrifice even one of them." They should have said maybe they'd be prepared to send in just one brave reporter, make them useful for a change. It seems as though the media and every armchair expert in NZ thought they knew better than experienced search and rescue people and the international resources they drew on. I can understand the families being stressed and angry, but they didn't need everyone else on their case while trying to work it all out. You can always do the review later.

This is a big loss.
 
This is a real tragedy, and it brings us back to earth after the miraculous rescue of the Chilean miners. It shows how miraculous that rescue truly was. I think people tend to think that we can pull anything off, and that's not true. This shows how absolutely dangerous mining is, and maybe some day, instead of pulling off miraculous rescues, we can come up with technology to do the job without people.
 
The thing is, the Chilean mine was a copper mine. The NZ one was a coal mine. Whole different ball game, unfortunately.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
The thing is, the Chilean mine was a copper mine. The NZ one was a coal mine. Whole different ball game, unfortunately.

Rolfe.
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Not to mention the Chilean Mine was a case of miners trapped underground due to a tunnel collapse. There was no reason to think they weren't alive.

In contrast, at Pike River there was an explosion and it's thought any collapse is highly unlikely, so if anyone had been alive they would have made their way out.

I really think it's important to stress the logistics of getting into this mine, for those wondering why no one went in straight away. Some experts have suggested that in a typical coal mine explosion there's a window of opportunity of up to four hours after the explosion in which to stage a rescue.

Well consider this...

The alarm was not even raised until two hours after the explosion. Why?

Because that's how long it took the two survivors to walk out the entrance tunnel.

Got that?

2 hours to walk the tunnel. Down hill.

A rescue team would have to walk that same length UPHILL before they even could think about looking for anyone in the network of work tunnels.

Put simply, even if you'd had a mines rescue team fully equipped and sitting at the surface waiting to go in, they wouldn't have even reached the pit bottom within that 4hr window of rescue.

And frankly I've found the comparisons with 9/11 by some media to be utterly disgusting, not only for the total lack of relevence, but because of a total lack of consideration for the facts of the case:

1. FDNY didn't perceive a collapse risk. If they had, no one would have gone in.
2. When FDNY DID realise there was a collapse risk they ordered all firefighting operations to stop and a mass evacuation.
3. 343 Firefighters and many other first responders were killed as a result of their heroism.
4. Not a single person trapped in those buildings was saved by first responders.

If anything, 9/11, unsuited as it is to a comparison, illustrates why the rescue teams couldn't go in, and why the decision to hold them was the right one.
 
I was getting a great deal of stick for suggesting some people might actually have done something to save Alison Hume (see http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=169278).

However, I totally see where everyone was coming from on this occasion. If a team had gone in, all that would have been achieved would have been more loss of life, and it's obvious those in charge knew that.

Rolfe.
 
Wirelight said:
Been watching this story here in Canada too.




You have obviously never taken a Confined Space or H2S Training Course have you?

Rule number 1: Don't let yourself be another victim.
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I have taken a confined space course, and part of it was a series of horror stories about people who rushed into lethal conditions in an effort to rescue somebody. In some cases as many as six people died in succession in an effort to rescue one person. It kind of made me wonder why number six thought he would fare better than the first five. It's human nature to want to rush in to save somebody in trouble, but in far too many cases, the result is only to add to the death toll.

As others have said, in a coal mine explosion like this, it's not all that likely that there are any survivors in there. If the explosion didn't get them, very likely carbon monoxide or hypoxia did.
 
gumboot said:
I really think it's important to stress the logistics of getting into this mine, for those wondering why no one went in straight away. Some experts have suggested that in a typical coal mine explosion there's a window of opportunity of up to four hours after the explosion in which to stage a rescue.

Well consider this...

The alarm was not even raised until two hours after the explosion. Why?

Because that's how long it took the two survivors to walk out the entrance tunnel.

Got that?

2 hours to walk the tunnel. Down hill.

A rescue team would have to walk that same length UPHILL before they even could think about looking for anyone in the network of work tunnels.

Put simply, even if you'd had a mines rescue team fully equipped and sitting at the surface waiting to go in, they wouldn't have even reached the pit bottom within that 4hr window of rescue.
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Interesting, thanks for that. I saw the Greymouth Mayor saying something to the effect that the rescuers had missed a "window of opportunity" after the first explosion. The media coverage here has been a bit ordinary - I wish they'd just leave the families alone. It's not news to be told over and over that people were upset and frustrated.
 
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I heard something this morning which surprised me a little.

The news was talking about the Board or directors or somesuch having a meeting and considering whether to reopen the mine or not, and one of the criteria for consideration was "...the fact that 29 people had died."

Now all sympathy for friends and family and so forth, but I completely fail to see how dead people factor into the question of whether we should reopen this (profitable, labour-hiring, commodity-producing) mine.

Safety, potential for similar events in the future, ecological considerations, stuff I've not thought of, sure - but deaths per se - I don't get it. Are they afraid that the ghosts are going to come back and haunt the place?
 
vIQleS said:
I heard something this morning which surprised me a little.

The news was talking about the Board or directors or somesuch having a meeting and considering whether to reopen the mine or not, and one of the criteria for consideration was "...the fact that 29 people had died."

Now all sympathy for friends and family and so forth, but I completely fail to see how dead people factor into the question of whether we should reopen this (profitable, labour-hiring, commodity-producing) mine.

Safety, potential for similar events in the future, ecological considerations, stuff I've not thought of, sure - but deaths per se - I don't get it. Are they afraid that the ghosts are going to come back and haunt the place?
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I'm not entirely certain on the specifics, but I believe one of the questions is whether the mine would return to operation if for some reason not all of the bodies could be recovered. Perhaps that's what was being referenced?
 
Knowing what had happened could have a serious effect on workplace morale. Not everyone can take such a pragmatic approach as you describe vIQleS. Some of the workers may have problems going back to work there.
 
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