Risk management
Safety the key to Pike River recovery INTERNATIONAL MINES RESCUE BODY CONFERENCE 2021 KEY SPEAKER DINGHY PATTINSON SHARES THE COMPLEX CHALLENGES OF ONE OF THE BIGGEST MINES RECOVERY EVENTS IN RECENT YEARS. The Pike River recovery involved more than 30 technical experts from around the world.
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he Pike River Coal Mine explosion in New Zealand during November 2010 claimed the lives of 29 men. Prior to the 2017 New Zealand general election, the families of the lost miners and the nation’s public were promised that a Labour-elected government would support and fund a re-entry if it was deemed technically viable and safe to do so. After the election, in January 2018, the Labour Party established the Pike River Recovery Agency Te Kāhui Whakamana Rua Tekau mā Iwa as a
stand-alone government department. Dinghy Pattinson was appointed as chief operating officer of the agency in early 2018, where he has overseen the planning and operational elements of the Pike River re-entry work and has responsibility for ensuring activities at the mine comply with statutory health and safety requirements. Pattinson says the mission of the agency was to conduct a safe, manned re-entry of the mine drift. “The founding principles we set ourselves were that we had to have a close partnership with the families
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and bring them along on the journey with us,” Pattinson says. “Health and safety was the first priority and we wanted to be transparent and open.” Due to the death of the workers the New Zealand Police wanted to conduct a forensic examination of the tunnel. To achieve that, Pattinson says the police deemed the mine site to be a crime scene and they were carrying out an investigation. “Early on in the planning (police) decided they were not going to go underground and they would train
