For a small nation, the loss of 29 miners in the Pike River mine blast, is hard to take. It is a tragedy that makes your heart sink with the unbearable knowledge that the loss of these men will cause to their families, friends, associates, town, and country. I knew none of them, but I understand the workings of a coal mine and the danger of gas building up, the possibility of combustive explosions, fires, and possible death. For a few years our family lived in Westport, on the West Coast of the South Island. A small, one-street town, there because of the mining industry, the logging, fishing, and cement. It was also a small port. Built near the side of the Buller river - a danger in itself, with its unstable sand-bar and rough seas - it was a service town. At our local high-school there was a great mix of kids: the doctor's daughter, with a studious air, the headmaster's son, behoven to be a good student, sons and daughters of the town's mongers, and the miners' kids. They lived out of town, by the various mines: Stockton, Denniston, Ngakawa Granity, and were collected and returned by bus each day, high up the West Coast mountains. On days when the weather was trecherous, which was quite often in the southern winters, the bus would not venture out, and the kids had the day off. You always knew how bad the weather might be, and how much it affected the township, by the presence of the miners' kids.
I think life was hard in those days, even though we thought the 60s were pretty progressive years. Men worked hard for a living on the West Coast, and the women's lives were spent supporting them and their families. Everyone knew everyone else. Many of the small clusters of houses that clung to the hillside near the mines have now all gone. Mines have shut down. Pubs have suffered...Forty years on and miners are still the same breed of people. Tough, resilient, tight-knit, workers. I don't know whether the first blast at Pike Mine would have allowed any survivors, even if they weren't all together in one area. The second blast was pure hell. And the third would have put paid to any residual hope.
Not knowing, must have been the hardest part. Hoping against hope. It was not like the mining disaster in South America; in a coal mine there are dangerous gases that kill.
No one in this country is unaware of this disaster. Television was saturated with the news, as were all the papers. Flags are now at half-mast, memorial services are being planned, realities are imposing themselves.
Twenty-nine miners.
