New Zealand held a national remembrance service yesterday for 29 coal miners killed in an explosion last month, with a line of 29 black-draped tables each bearing a fallen miner’s helmet, lamp and name serving as the centerpiece.
Pike River mine was rocked by an explosion Nov. 19, trapping the 29 miners. A second major blast five days later dashed hopes any of the workers had survived, and the men’s bodies have still not been recovered.
Two more explosions have occurred since, including one on Sunday that shot flames into the air, signaling a raging underground coal fire that continues to burn.
Photo: AFP
More than 10,000 mourners attended the somber open-air service for the dead miners under a sunny sky yesterday at Greymouth’s Omoto Racecourse on South Island. People paused for a two-minute silence before the service to remember the dead men. Flags flew at half-staff on government buildings nationwide.
Victims’ families placed photos, tributes and personal items — including clothing, a rugby ball, surfboards, a guitar and a cricket bat — alongside the miners’ helmets on the tables.
Men, women and children, many weeping, filed quietly past the tables to pay their respects.
“In a very real sense, those men are with us because of those tables,” Reverend Tim Mora, who led the service, told the silent crowd.
Grieving father Lawrie Drew said he would not feel a sense of closure until his son Zen’s body was recovered.
“It’s not closure for me. Not until I see the body,” he told the Stuff news Web site ahead of the service.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said the nation’s 4 million people were standing behind the region’s tight-knit community.
“We hoped ... they’d emerge from the depths of the Earth,” he told the mourners. “But they never came home.”
Recovery teams started a jet engine known as the “gag” machine overnight on Wednesday, blowing inert gases and water vapor into the burning mine to quench the fire raging since Sunday.
Police Superintendent Gary Knowles told reporters once the explosive gases are expelled, work will begin to cool soaring temperatures inside the mine to allow for the recovery of the 29 bodies. However, mine experts have warned it would be a slow process, he said.
Foreign diplomats, including high commissioners from Australia, Britain and South Africa — who lost nationals in the disaster — were also at the service.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
RSS