New Zealand police said yesterday they were abandoning efforts to retrieve the bodies of 29 men killed in one of the country’s worst mine disasters.
After a two-month operation, police commissioner Howard Broad said there was no realistic prospect of recovering the bodies entombed in the Pike River colliery since Nov. 19, when a methane gas explosion tore through the mine.
Broad said the mine would be handed back to the receivers who had taken charge of the Pike River Coal company and it would be up to them to decide if recovery efforts should resume once volatile gases underground have subsided.
FOCUS ON THE LIVING
The other option was to “simply put a fence around it and walk away,” Broad said.
“In my view, it is time to focus on the living, and respect and memorialize those men who have died,” he said.
The victims of the disaster, which New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said had plunged the country into mourning, included two Australians, two Britons and a South African.
A series of explosions continued to rock the mine in the weeks following the initial blast, igniting an underground fire and making the pit, on the South Island’s remote west coast, too dangerous to enter.
FAILURE
Efforts to stabilize the underground atmosphere this week by sealing cracks in the mine shaft with expanding foam then flooding the pit with inert gases failed and Broad said sending in recovery teams would put lives at risk.
Since the disaster, Pike River Coal has been placed in receivership and most of its employees have been made redundant.
Executives at Pike River had hoped to eventually reopen the mine, but shares in the company have been suspended since receivers took over in the middle of last month and the latest development casts further doubt on its future.
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