preview

A Report On Pike River Mine Essay

Decent Essays

Pike river mine was in a lot trouble and needed something to get rid of financial debts that had piled up over the years. The mine was new and the owner, Pike River Coal Ltd, had not completed the systems and infrastructure necessary to safely produce coal. It’s health and safety systems were poorly maintained and the ventilation and methane drainage systems weren’t coping with everything the company was trying to do for example, driving roadways through coal and drilling into the coal seam and extracting coal by hydro mining, a method known to produce large quantities of methane. They wanted to start a system called “hydro-mining”. Hydro-mining uses a high pressure jet of water to carve coal from the surface or the coalface, which was found to be well-suited to the coal seams of New Zealand’s West Coast. In 2008, he (Nishioka) was asked to draw up a plan for a hydro system at pike river mine and to put forward a budget and price to supply most of the requirements as well as equipment needed. When Masaoki Nishioka arrived at Pike River Mine he found he was in a situation that was much worse than he had expected.
The mines core infrastructure wasn’t ready for hydro-mining to begin with because it was still reliant on a small backup fan located at the top of the ventilation shaft and the main fan, which was the mines source of ventilation, wasn’t installed yet and there was no emergency exit. Also, the company had purchased all of the hydro-mining equipment from Australia,

Get Access