Editorial: Give us hard facts on Pike River disaster

Bernie Monk embraces a supporter after a memorial service for his son Michael. Photo / Herald on Sunday

It is time for someone to do some hard talking on the subject of Pike River. The families of the deceased maintain some hope the miners' remains may be recovered.

The West Coast maintains hope that the mine may be made operable again. The receivers of Pike River Coal are aiming to do what the police and mine recovery teams could not do - stabilise the air in the shafts.

Their plan, however, does not include the recovery of the bodies or offer any assurance that the mine may have a future. They say it might take two years before the mine can be re-entered.

Meanwhile, the Government's royal commission of inquiry has yet to begin its hearings and the public still does not know for certain what caused the fateful explosion on November 19.

Two months on, we have yet to receive any information that might help all concerned come to terms with what has happened and what realistically can be expected.

One of the first things the Government should do when it gets back into gear for the year is to start getting some useful information on Pike River into the public domain. Its commission of inquiry is not the only investigation in progress.

A coroner's inquest is due to begin in Greymouth next week and the Department of Labour is doing an interim safety audit of underground mines. But neither of those inquiries might determine the likely cause of the disaster.

The royal commission must do so. That is its first term of reference. It should hold hearings without delay. It cannot wait forever to discover whether it will be possible to gather information within the mine. A certain amount must already be known.

The geology of the site, the problems and risks it presented, the steps the company took or was supposed to take to minimise and monitor them, the inspection regime or lack of one, the construction and its hold-ups, the financial arrangements, the management of the mine and any safety mishaps it suffered in the short time it was operating - all these considerations will be part of the inquiry whether or not it eventually gains access to the mine.

Information and views on all of those subjects can begin to be canvassed in public testimony to the commission, which is led by High Court judge Graham Pankhurst and includes an Australian commissioner for mine safety, Stewart Bell. The arguments they hear and the conclusions they reach would be well-informed speculation but that may be the best we get in the end.

At the very least, an open airing of the issues that have dogged Pike River from the beginning would bring an air of realism to all discussion of the disaster and that might be a blessing to the grieving.

False hopes have lingered long enough. The equivocations they heard from police and other authorities from the first day of the disaster continued even after the "rescue" operation became a "recovery".

Now they cannot help but hope that the company receiver's plans will permit the recovery of bodies, despite what the receivers have said. If the mine is ever entered, why would the remains not be recovered? The sad question would not arise once an inquiry had established the likely heat and force of the blasts.

Perhaps the coroner can say enough on that to close the subject for the sake of the stricken families. A spokesman has said they are ready to turn all their attention on the inquiry, which they want to sit in Greymouth so that the families can take a full part in it. They deserve no less.

The whole country deserves to be learning by now a lot more about this mine and its operations. Some people know all about it and must have a very good idea what probably happened to cause the disaster. It is time we started hearing the hard facts.