The conditions of the below permit were responsibilities of the company (Pike River Mine) and required oversight by government officials. Amongst many things, this includes adequate ventilation:
The company may be guilty of gross negligence in regards to mining safety and/or not providing adequate safety measures to its contractors and employees.
Company
records (electronic and physical), including CCTV footage of all camera locations, employee records,
training records etc are vital pieces of information for a negligence enquiry. When was the totality of these seized?
For each company record that will be used to support the company's favour, should testing, such as electronic forensic evidence be used to verify source and timing of origination?
During media press conferences, has the company had the opportunity to provide misleading information in order to present a case in defense. Is there any possibility the company may have answered questions from journalists for the primary purpose of forming a defense against a potential case of negligence, or were the company's answers genuine?
Can answers by the company be verified through independent expert
testimony?
Can the existence of pre-explosion pertinent company records be verified through electronic forensic evidence?
Will electronic forensic evidence be used to detect if there has been an attempt to delete pertinent company records, (ie, emails)?
Any delay in seizing data storage devices, such as hard drives, will increase the risk of contamination? When were these records seized?
Sunday November 28, 2010
GUYON ESPINER interviews PETER
WHITTALL
GUYON Could
I start by adding my own small voice of condolence for this tragedy, and to
recognise that you have fronted up to the public and to the media constantly,
and I appreciate you doing that for us again today. PETER WHITTALL
- You're more than welcome.
GUYON I
just want to get a picture of how much of an issue methane was at this
mine. And I go back to the company's annual review for 2010, when it
estimated that for the next year it could see 105,000 to 185,000 tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent. That sounds like a lot of methane, enough for the
company to even consider using it for power generation on site. I mean,
was this a very gassy mine?
PETER It
was a moderately gassy mine. It had quite a range of gas, from virtually
nothing on the escarpment, obviously, to the west - it's bled off over many
thousands of years - to still low levels about more than half the lease, but it
was quite gassy, I would say moderately gassy, on the eastern side of the
lease, which is the first part that we're mining. The actual total
quantity of gas per cubic metre, or per ton of coal, wasn't very very
high. I've worked in mines with up to twice as much methane as what Pike
had. Because we had a thick seam and because we had quite permeable coal
- in other words, the gas was given off freely - then the daily hazard or the
daily management requirement for gas was foremost in our operational
requirements.
GUYON And
what did that mean in terms of monitoring? Was there continuous
monitoring for methane in this mine?
PETER Yeah,
there was. We have a range of different monitoring types. We go
from hand-held where the mining officials, including myself, carry a hand-held
methane monitor wherever you go, and you can test in places likely to find
methane, like up in high parts of the roof or cavities. And when I or the
mine managers do an inspection, or the underviewers on shift do their
inspections, one of the things they always test for is methane. And also
the guys in charge of each of the development units, the deputies and the
senior mining guys, also have hand-held methane detectors. The machinery
themselves that's cutting coal, they have methane monitors on board that cut
power automatically if the methane levels go above what's actually a very low
percentage and nowhere near the explosive range. And then we also have
parts of the mine that are monitored continuously and electronically, and that
data is fed back to our control room on the surface 24 hours a day, seven days
a week.
GUYON One
of the former miners who now lives in Australia is reported in the weekend
newspapers as saying that there were problems with gas and with ventilation,
and he claims that some of the concerns were ignored. Is that true?
PETER Oh,
that's absolutely not true. Ignored, never. Worked on,
constantly. Would we have had issues in the early stages of the
mine? Absolutely. One of the things you do as you go into a coal
seam, you've got a lot of boreholes and you've got a lot of data, but you also
have to learn your operational parameters. So as the mine was very early
starting on, we would be learning how quickly the gas was given off, how
quickly it could accumulate. That's why the mining officials would be
taking learnings from those. We started drilling holes for exploration,
and initially we didn't believe we would need to start directing that gas
anywhere in particular other than just up the ventilation shaft. But with
time, we started to get more holes and started to gather that gas into
pipelines and reticulate it through the mine and exhaust it up boreholes.
So it wasn't a learning process in gas. The people running the mine
including myself, other mine managers and underviewers that were very
experienced in gas, it's more about learning the aspects of the mine that
you're working with. You're working with Mother Nature, and every mine is
different, and even different parts of the mine are different. I would
absolutely say that from a process, from a management, from an intent and from
a systems point of view, we never ignored any safety concerns. I can't
vouch for individuals, albeit that anyone else as an individual who did the
wrong thing or was ignoring a safety procedure would be taken to task over
that, and that behaviour would be rectified.
GUYON So
given what you have said, it would seem unlikely that there could have been a
slow build-up of methane because of your monitoring systems, so are we - I know
it's difficult to speculate - but are we talking about a situation where
there's been a sudden rush of methane into the mine?
PETER Um,
you're right, it is hard to speculate. But I would agree with your first
comment, to allow a slow build-up of methane in our working areas I would find
very unlikely, given that at the time of the incident we were on a continuous
shift, they'd been working all day. And the night before mining officials
had been taking methane readings, and in the working faces we've got the
records from the early indications - and I haven't gone back through those
thoroughly, that hasn't been our focus - but my indications from reading those
reports is that they were being done properly. The only reports we
haven't got are from one of the guys, Peter O'Neill, who is still in the mine.
And his shift went longer, through the end of the shift. He worked a
12-hour shift, so his reports for that build-up that day before are still with
him. But I would expect that there hasn't been a slow build-up in many of
the working faces. However, there is an area of the mine, in our hydro
panel where we were working, whereby the very nature of it, just the same as a
longwall mine, which are more common in Australia, you have by definition a
large goaf or gob area, or goaf area, we call it, it's a large void where the
roof falls in, and that by its nature will fill with gas, and that's part of
the mining process.
GUYON How
recently, if at all, had you been shotfiring or blasting in the mine?
PETER We
shotfire and blast every day, we have done for a couple of years. We have
procedures for that. And on this particular day I understand we did a
very small shot on a piece of roadway where sometimes if you can't get a
machine in to mine it, and it's only small, you want a small little stub
roadway, then shotfiring's the most quick and efficient way. We had fired
a shot at 11 o'clock, 11am, I believe. I haven't looked at the records,
but I've asked management on site, and was assured that the explosives and
detonators had all been booked out. Those that were used were accounted
for, and those that weren't used were returned and accounted for, and they were
happy with the procedures that were followed. So I have said before that,
to my knowledge and the knowledge of the management that have advised me,
there's no direct link between our shotfiring activities, and there was no
shotfiring to our knowledge going on at the time of the incident.
GUYON The
company has said in previous documentation when it's been reporting that the
miners were gonna get transponders so that they could be located. These
transponders would sit in the lamps of the helmets. Did that happen, and
were they working? Because it seemed that we didn't know where the miners
were.
PETER That
was implemented to a certain extent. It was in transition, we had some in
a budget. It's quite new, I've never had those before, so it was quite
new to me. I believe I had one in my cap lamp, though it was only in a
transition phase. It's not like a GPS, though, so you don't walk around
the mine, or on a surface, and know where everyone is within the metre.
It actually goes past certain detection points. So you would have one at
the entrance to the mine and it would record that you've gone underground, and
you may have them at the entrance to panels and that would record that you've
gone into that place in the mine. Our mine was a very small area.
To my knowledge, we haven't put those location points or monitoring points
underground at all, if maybe one place. I'm just not sure of that at the
moment. But the difficulty with knowing where people are is because it's
not a GPS system they were known to go into certain areas; where in those
certain areas they are, and even if all the cap lamps had had those
transponders, to my knowledge, we would still only know that they were
generally in an area of the mine.
GUYON Just
in the last couple of minutes we have, I wanna speak more generally about
mining safety in New Zealand. I know that you made a submission to the
Department of Labour review where you made some very strong comments about the
lack of mine inspectors in New Zealand. Would they have made any
difference if you had had more mine inspectors who could have checked these
mines out more frequently?
PETER No,
as I said, we really aren't into the investigation phase from our point of view
yet. So depending on the outcome of this, uh, our own internal
investigation, which will start as well - as we would normally on any safety
incident - or on anything else that anyone else finds, uh, I can't comment on
what the root cause is yet. I don't know, and therefore I can't comment
on specifically would more inspectors have made a difference here. But I
can comment, generically, that we have a very good relationship with our
district inspector; he visits the mine reasonably regularly. And I don't
believe, off the knowledge I have now, that more frequent inspections from him
would have made any difference at all. He reviewed our systems, he was
there to my knowledge a week or so earlier, but that's to my memory, meeting
with our general manager, who's also the statutory mine manager at the moment,
and that inspector is reasonably intimately knowledgeable of the Pike
operations. No, I do know the submission you're talking about, but in
that particular point I don't believe that would have been the case.
