Pike River: twenty-nine men who were never brought out

GREYMOUTH, New Zealand — At about 3:45 p.m. on November 19, 2010, methane exploded in the Pike River coal mine on the South Island of New Zealand. Twenty-nine men were underground. Two walked out. The rest were never recovered.

The mine was new and had been troubled from the start, with a geological setting that made gas management unusually hard: a thick seam under rock that let methane migrate freely. The miners were working more than a mile in, at the end of a single tunnel.

Rescue teams were ready to go in. Then a second explosion shook the surface, and then a third. The scale of what a rescue crew would be walking into became undeniable, and the operation shifted from rescue to recovery — and then, when the mine kept generating gas and refusing to settle, to sealing it.

A royal commission found that the mine had been designed and operated with serious systemic failures: inadequate gas management, a ventilation system that gave the mine no safe way to control methane when things went wrong, and a regulatory body that had been restructured to the point where it could not do its job.

Pike River is the case New Zealand keeps reopening. Families have fought for years for the mine to be re-entered so the men can be brought out, and the argument has become part of how the country thinks about a regulator's duty.

For the rest of the mining world, the lesson is about single-entry headings and the cost of a ventilation design that has nowhere for gas to go. A crew behind a blown-through section has options. A crew at the end of one tunnel has none.