The Pike River tragedy: How deregulation and corner-cutting turned deadly

No one had dedicated responsibility for ventilation management. Photo / Getty Images

On Monday, Rebecca Macfie detailed how the Pike River disaster led to much-needed health and safety reforms which were never fully implemented. Now, 15 years on, the coalition is unravelling what was done. You can read that story here. In Part II, the Listener explores how
the tragedy underscored what can happen when deregulated oversight is mixed with a business determined to cut corners.

On the ruggedly beautiful Paparoa Range on the South Island West Coast on November 19, 2010, 31 men were in the Pike River coal mine when a large methane explosion occurred. Only two men walked out. Sixteen Pike River staff and 13 contractors perished.

In 2012, a Royal Commission of Inquiry found the disaster was preventable, citing numerous ignored warnings and a dangerous operating environment, especially concerning methane levels. Apart from management failings by Pike River Coal, the inquiry also blamed lack of oversight by the Department of Labour.

The venture was plagued by problems from the start. After insufficient geological investigations, adverse ground conditions hindered mine development and caused extensive delays.

There were six mine managers in the 26 months before the explosion. Chief executive Gordon Ward resigned in September 2010 and was replaced by Peter Whittall, who had driven the project since 2005 as general manager. The mine workforce was by then under acute pressure to start producing coal.

At the time of the fatal explosion, Pike was still in start-up mode and considerably behind schedule. A second entrance, which would have provided an additional escape route in an emergency, was not built. The company instead designated a ventilation shaft with a 110m vertical ladder as the mine’s second means of egress, which the inquiry found was “probably impossible” to use in an emergency.

The health and safety management plan was also largely in draft. Methane was a significant problem but a ventilation management plan was deficient and investigation of incident reports haphazard. Contractor health and safety management was lax. Many miners were inexperienced or unused to New Zealand conditions – “a serious problem was the workers’ practice of bypassing safety devices on mining machinery so work could continue regardless of the presence of methane”.

Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall had driven the project since 2005 but health and safety charges against him were dropped. Photo / Getty Images

Pike’s decision to locate the main ventilation fan underground in the gassy mine was a major error; no one had dedicated responsibility for ventilation management.

The beginning of highly specialised, high-pressure hydro mining, which began in September, raised the risk of disturbing and releasing methane. Not even a month before the disaster, a significant roof fall caused a pressure wave and methane spike, but no explosion occurred. Risks were such that the Department of Labour should not have allowed hydro mining to begin.

Apart from electrical causes, previous incidents suggested “contraband” – workers smoking or using battery-powered devices – as a potential ignition source for the explosion.

The inquiry report found regulatory changes including the splitting of responsibilities between different government agencies contributed to the health and safety defects.

Eighteen months previously, the Ministry of Economic Development had ceased carrying out electrical safety inspections for the Department of Labour, which had no capacity to continue them. There were not enough mines inspectors and they were insufficiently trained.

The department assumed the company to be a “best practice” and “compliant” employer, so its inspectors adopted a low-level compliance approach.

Rules and safeguards for mining had been swept away with the 1992 Health and Safety in Employment Act, which placed primary responsibility for health and safety with employers: this was seen by the department as somehow reducing its responsibility to administer the legislation. Although new codes of practice were later introduced, New Zealand’s regulatory framework for underground coal mining was years behind other countries.

The inquiry recommended the creation of a standalone government agency to improve the country’s poor health and safety performance – which became WorkSafe NZ.

From left, Sonya Rockhouse, Anna Osbourne, and Rowdy Durbridge. Photo / Getty Images

It called for worker involvement in health and safety systems and inspections; making company directors responsible for health and safety oversight; minimum specifications for hazard management plans and employee involvement in their design.

In 2012, 12 health and safety charges were laid against Peter Whittall but they were dropped after $3.41 million was paid to the victims’ families. Following an application for judicial review by Sonya Rockhouse and Anna Osborne, who lost a son and a husband in the disaster, that decision was ruled “an unlawful bargain to stifle prosecution” by the Supreme Court in 2017.

In 2021, a re-entry team got as far as a roof fall 2.26km up the mine access tunnel. The government ruled out further manned re-entry due to the mine’s instability and the roof fall obstacle. Today, the mine is closed, and the bodies of the 29 workers remain entombed, a memorial track winding past the mine entrance. Police continue to work with Crown Law on whether to lay criminal charges.

In 2022, former Listener journalist Rebecca Macfie, whose 2013 account of the disaster, Tragedy at Pike River Mine, helped drive political reforms, looked back on the “story without end”.

She wrote: “Pike’s slow start, fateful decisions steamrolled past an enfeebled regulator, machines that didn’t work, a ventilation shaft that collapsed and got patched up; red flags ignored by incurious directors … that slow start built into a sprint to catastrophe.”

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