The Pike River Mine disaster occurred on 19 November 2010 in the West Coast region of New Zealand’s South Island. At the time of the explosion 31 miners and contractors were below ground. Two miners managed to walk from the mine and were treated for moderate injuries. Subsequent explosions on the 24th, 26th and 28th of November ended any hopes of any further survivors and raised serious doubt that any bodies would ever be recovered.
About Pike River Mine disaster in brief
The Pike River Mine disaster occurred on 19 November 2010 in the West Coast region of New Zealand’s South Island. The accident resulted in the deaths of 29 miners whose remains have never been recovered. At the time of the explosion 31 miners and contractors were below ground. Two miners managed to walk from the mine and were treated for moderate injuries. Subsequent explosions on the 24th, 26th and 28th of November ended any hopes of any further survivors and raised serious doubt that any bodies would ever be recovered. In December 2012, Prime Minister John Key said he would apologise in person to the families of the dead, for the government’s weak regulations and inadequate inspection regime. In 2017 the Government established a new Pike River Recovery Agency, with re-entry expected by March 2019. Re-entry is expected to cost USD 23 million over three years. The agency took over the mine from Solid Energy, after it entered liquidation in mid-March 2018. It is not known what sparked the explosion, but a working mine contains several possible ignition sources. Methane may have accumulated in a void formed during earlier mining activities, then been expelled into the rest of the mine by a roof fall. The second explosion was not caused by anybody working in or around the mine. The third explosion appeared to be located near the bottom of the shaft, near the burning coal seam. A fourth explosion ignited the coal within the mine; subsequent fire was visible above the ventilation shaft. The fourth explosion caused the subsequent fire to be visible above and beyond the shaft.
It was eventually ascertained that there were 16 miners and 13 contractors trapped. The names of the missing workers were released on 21 November 2010. The mine area will return to the Department of Conservation, who are constructing a \”Pike29 Memorial Track\”, in the adjacent Paparoa National Park. The first explosion is believed to have occurred at around 3: 44 pm (NZDT, UTC+13) on November 19, 2010. A second explosion occurred at 2: 37 pm on 24 November 2010; it was believed that no one could have survived. Although families had held out hope that some of the miners may have survived, it was thought by the rescue team that all had been killed by the initial explosion. The explosion sent smoke, explosive gases up a mine shaft where a team of rescue staff had been taking samples; the noise of the rising explosion provided enough warning to get the area clear, evacuating the area on foot on the foot of the area. A level of 95% methane was found, with the remainder primarily carbon monoxide. There were no signs of life in refuges and air samples showed almost no oxygen. The mines had not collapsed and air was blowing freely throughout the tunnels indicating that there had been no obstructions to survivors leaving the mine or indicating their presence by tapping on pipes or calling for help. The country’s worst loss of life caused by a single disaster since the 1979 crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901 was surpassed three months later by the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
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