In November 2010, a series of underground methane gas explosions trapped and killed 29 men inside the Pike River coal mine in New Zealand. Almost 11 years later, no one from Pike River Coal has been held responsible for the extremely dangerous conditions that led to this preventable disaster.
Now the Labor Party-led government has ended the underground mine investigation. It seals evidence crucial to the mine’s work, including the underground ventilator, which is said to have set off the first explosion on November 19, 2010.
The Pike River Recovery Agency (PRRA) website says work has resumed over the past week to permanently seal the mine gate. The work was interrupted by a lockdown imposed last month following an epidemic of COVID-19.
The PRRA was created in the wake of the 2017 elections, in which Labor and its coalition partners, the Greens and the NZ First Party, vowed to uncover the evidence needed to prosecute those responsible for one of the worst disasters. New Zealand industrial plants. The agency, however, only explored the mine gallery, or access tunnel. The government has refused to allow exploration of mining sites, despite experts saying it could be done safely, to recover evidence and search for human remains.
A 2012 royal commission found that company management put production and profit before the safety of its workers and ignored dozens of warnings that the mine could explode due to surveillance and ventilation insufficient methane gas and other illegal practices, including the lack of an emergency exit. The Department of Labor (DoL, now known as WorkSafe) brought charges against Pike River CEO Peter Whittall for violating health and safety laws, but those were dropped in 2013 as part of a behind-the-scenes deal with Whittall’s lawyers.
The DoL was complicit in the disaster: it allowed the mine to operate in violation of health and safety rules. The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), which had dozens of members in Pike River, acted as an auxiliary to the company. He took no action to defend the workers and made no public criticism of the conditions in the mine.
After the first explosion, Andrew Little, then leader of the EPMU, defended the company’s safety record. It is no coincidence that Little is now “minister responsible for the re-entry of Pike River”, responsible for sealing the mine and the evidence inside.
The government’s actions have sparked significant opposition, including protests from families and supporters of the victims, as well as international mining experts, miners and other workers around the world. A petition opposing the sealing of the mine was signed by 6,600 people.
In June, 22 of the 29 families of the victims supported the lawsuit brought by Bernie Monk, whose son Michael died in the disaster, opposing the decision to seal the mine before the conclusion of a police investigation into the catastrophe.
Following the 2017 election, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Little had promised to work closely with families on every decision relating to the inquiry. The PRRA website always prominently displays the words: “Partnering with the families of Pike River”. This has now been completely exposed as a fraud.
Minister Little released a statement on September 14 as part of a deal with lawyers for the families to end the lawsuit. He says: “Towards the end of 2019, the minister foreshadowed to the Family Reference Group that he was unlikely to exceed the drift. The Minister now accepts that families who were not represented by the Family Reference Group [FRG] were not informed and were not included in this communication.
The FRG was established under the PRRA and consists of three family members who support the government and two advisers (Rob Egan and Tony Sutorius) employed by the agency.
Little’s statement, which was almost completely obscured by corporate media, essentially admits that the FRG did not truly represent the majority of families, as the government claimed.
In March 2020, Little told Cabinet he would not seek additional funding to explore the mining work. His statement now states that he “accepts that his decision not to explore the feasibility of returning to the mining operations should have been communicated to all members of the Pike River family before it was presented to Cabinet.” The Minister accepts that this caused harm to several family members as a result of this. “
Initially, the government told the families that the PRRA would assess the feasibility of exploring the mining sites once the gallery is recovered. This work was never undertaken.
Little gives no explanation for the failure to consult families on key decisions, implying that this is a regrettable oversight. The reality is that the majority of families have been deliberately kept in the dark by the Labor led government. Like the previous National Party government, it is engaged in a cover-up operation aimed at protecting those responsible for the disaster.
Little claims he supports “the ongoing criminal investigation by police into the tragedy.” This involves drilling boreholes to lower the cameras in the mine workings. So far, no findings have been published of this process, which falls far short of the kind of in-depth forensic examination normally undertaken at a crime scene.
Police, in fact, have previously insisted they were unable to lay charges without an examination of the scene establishing the precise cause of the explosions. A first investigation was dropped for this reason in July 2013, although the police admitted that there was “a lot of evidence [from the royal commission] that there were widespread deviations from accepted mining standards.
Bernie Monk told the WSWS that Little’s statement was “the closest we’ve ever had” to an apology from the government. “We were screwed up and there was a cover-up, everyone knows that now,” he said. “No one has been convicted. [The authorities] made an amicable settlement [with Whittall] behind closed doors. They did all they could to cover it up.
He believed the government had tried to exhaust families by dragging out the investigation for years. Monk added that important evidence had been disclosed to the families, including electronic images and videos taken by lowered cameras in boreholes in 2011, indicating the likelihood that men survived the first explosion. A second explosion five days later ended any chance of survivors. Monk and others, including electrical engineer Richard Healey, say there is evidence the second explosion was caused by someone igniting a conveyor belt in the mine, which police deny.
Dean Dunbar, whose 17-year-old son Joseph died in Pike River, told the WSWS that the lack of accountability from Pike River Coal and government agencies meant such disasters would inevitably continue.
He accused the Labor Party of using the Pike River families “as pawns” to win the 2017 election, and said the Labor Party never intended to move beyond a pile of coal at the end of the drifting tunnel to uncover the truth about the disaster. He pointed out that police misplaced significant evidence of the mine, including part of the underground fan that exploded in the first explosion, which could have provided answers as to the cause of the explosion.
Responding to Little’s assertion that the government continues to seek ‘blame’ for the disaster, Dunbar pointed out: ‘Only a few months ago Andrew Little went on TV and said Pike’s families River had already received justice. Can someone please explain to me and my family what justice has been done for my boy? “
Dunbar again called on workers employed by the PRRA to stop work on installing the final seal. He asked if these workers wanted to be remembered “the team that buried our children and helped ensure the cover-up continued.”
Dunbar rejected the PRRA’s claims, intended to mislead workers, that the seal is technically reversible. The joint consists of 30 meters of concrete and is designed to be permanent. Re-entering the mine would cost millions of dollars and take months of work.
The catastrophe and ten-year cover-up in Pike River is an example of class justice that contains vital lessons for all working people. It demonstrates the role of the Labor Party and the union bureaucracy as defenders of big business and the capitalist system. Like the global COVID-19 pandemic, the disaster underscores the need for workers to adopt a socialist perspective and build new organizations to defend their conditions and their lives: grassroots, independent labor safety committees and of the political establishment. , and controlled by the workers themselves.
