Editorial: Now is not the time for blame

A memorial for the victims of the Pike River mine disaster. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Among all the words written and spoken since the deadly explosion ripped through the Pike River mine on November 19, the key sentence appeared in a New Zealand Herald report on Thursday, the day after the second blast tore apart the hopes of the anxious West Coast community.

It was this: "Every mining expert the Herald spoke to believed that if rescuers had entered the mine on [the first] Friday afternoon, it would have been a recovery mission."

That sentence summarised the harsh truth that so many thought but no one dared to say during the 120 fraught hours between the first explosion and the announcement that the second had occurred.

It is probable that those in charge of the operation knew as much. How else to interpret their certainty that the second blast had extinguished all life if the first one had not? Like the rest of us, they doubtless wanted to cling to hope and the second explosion brought that to an end.

The reality is that the brave, doomed 29 almost certainly perished on day one. In the unlikely event that any survived the first blast, they would surely have succumbed within minutes, if not seconds, to the silent, deadly brew of toxic gases deep in the mine.

It is a grim conclusion but it is one that should offer some small degree of comfort to the bereaved. As those above ground struggled to mount a rescue operation, as the families and friends of the miners fretted and waited, the overwhelming likelihood is that the trapped miners were already beyond all human help.

When considered against that background, the conduct of the rescue operation becomes less problematic. The repeated delays and setbacks during the five days of waiting caused the West Coast community understandable anguish, which at times gave way to barely disguised anger.

No one could blame them for that: anxiety breeds impatience at the best of times; this was the worst of times and the word anxiety does not begin to do justice to what the families were feeling.

Likewise it was easy to understand the desperate bravado of those who wanted the chance to go in even as they were being told such an incursion would likely have been suicidal as well as pointless.

Tasman District police commander, Superintendent Gary Knowles, who headed up the operation, came in for criticism for what looked like hesitancy but was vindicated on Wednesday for his sensible prudence. He would certainly have been operating on the unspoken assumption that the men were dead and that the initiative he was leading was a rescue operation in name only.

In one or more of the inquiries that will be held into the disaster, his management may be found to have been wanting. But his singlemindedness, professionalism and dedication - and this goes for everyone who worked under him - will surely remain untarnished.

At times like this, the temptation to lay blame is almost overwhelming. It is easy for those of us who watched the tragedy unfold from the comfort of our armchairs to think we knew better than those who were on the ground, day by day, battling with the reality.

Those most heavily bruised by the disaster, whose bottled-up grief came out in spurts of righteous rage, were even more understandably critical.

It's all part of a process that we need to allow them, and ourselves, to go through. For a while, we will all need to let off our own head of steam: green lobbyists will say the disaster underlines the urgency of the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels; mining interests might resonably counter that our distaste for open-cast mining puts working men at unreasonable risk. Everything that everyone says in the next few days will have a germ of truth in it - but nobody will be completely right.

The time will come to sift through all those opinions and get to the truth. This is not the time for answers, nor even for questions. It is time to contemplate our loss and take the first tentative steps towards healing.