Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Will you accept a response time by the emergency services of 16:53? Such precision will have come from the dispatch system used by the Fire Service and Police, and wouldn't be available to the media from any other source (except decoding of paging messages to the area's volunteer fire brigades).
If you accept that, then unless you dispute an explosion time of around 15:45 it's impossible for the Herald's stated "two hours" to be remotely accurate. Even if the survivor's account is wrong on timing, which is entirely possible, the claim that it took two hours to alert emergency services and that it was done by the guys who made it out of the mine doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Gio, that’s nice and all, but it doesn’t add up.
Explosion’s accepted time of occurrence is 15:45, give or take. Stuff’s timeline, linked above, puts emergency services responding at 16:53 – that time will be from dispatch logs. That’s not two hours after the explosion, and is an hour-ish before reports start to circulate that a couple of men have exited the mine.
[ETA: The 16:53 response time also fits with reports that it was SOP to wait an hour from loss of communication before alerting emergency services.]So will you accept that the Herald has it wrong? Or insist that the survivor account is wrong, the accepted time of the explosion is wrong, and that the emergency services’ computerised dispatch logs are wrong? Because they’re not compatible scenarios.
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Hard News: What about that Welfare…, in reply to vangam,
Well if you gave each of them a very generous 50,000 per annum it would only tally 17.8 billion. How do they account for the other 31 billion?
By working from the premise that everyone currently receiving a benefit continues to do so for the remainder of their life, and that growth in benefit numbers continues on current trends (ignoring that, like, we're in a recession and people, like, don't have jobs because there aren't jobs to be had) and that all those people also stay on benefits for the remainder of their lives! Lies, damned lies, statistics. And the WWG is a lower form still, it seems.
Yes, that's really how they came up with $50b. Constantly increasing entries, with no exits. Ignoring the economic realities of the world at present, and that for most people a benefit (talking here about UEB) is a payment that lasts for a few months.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Zing, and double zing. That's brutal in its truthiness, but needs to be plastered large on a wall in every home, office, factory and school in the country.
I know I've pontificated somewhat large on this incident, but I have tried very hard to keep within the realms of what I know through direct experience and education. -
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to James George,
another kiwi trick have 5 inquiries instead of one
Some of these various inquiries are required by law. OSH must investigate, by law, because people died. The Coroner must rule the men dead, and last I saw hadn't decided if there was going to be an inquest. These things cannot be combined, because their statutorily-required outcomes are not the same. OSH is not competent to declare people dead, and the Coroner is not competent to determine breaches of the HSEA.
The Commission of Inquiry isn't legally required, but it would be foolish for one not to be held given the nature of what's happened. It, again, cannot be combined with the other two because their statutory purposes are different. What're the other two inquiries to which you refer?
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how were miners not required to touch base at regular intervals with those outside, and was there anybody outside, safety equipment at the ready?
Given that the electrician was sent in to deal with a reported fault, it's possible that the fault was with the telephone link into the mine. We haven't been told the precise details. Remember that there's no radio communication into a deep hole in the ground, only whatever you can run over physical cable. It's possible that there was no regular communication protocol, in which case I would say that's damning more in not being required by regulation (because it's not exactly hard to set up a comms log, and the telephone connections are installed as a matter of course) than in anything Pike River did. I'll reserve judgement.
As for a rescue team, are you familiar with the two-in, two-out rule? It's a principle of fire fighting and urban search-and-rescue that for every two people you send in, you have two more standing by to rescue the rescuers. Not sure if the rule is used in mines rescue, but would be surprised if it's not. Plus there's a lot of personnel management involved in this kind of rescue. Entry control logs, communications, equipment management, etc. Keeping around enough people to run a coordinated, safe rescue effort is very expensive. It costs the Fire Service a million dollars a year, give or take, to keep a single-pump career station (four shifts of four fire fighters) running, and it takes a lot more than four people to mount a proper mine rescue operation.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to James George,
The only evidence enyone has that this mine was safe is the continual protestation by the company boss that it was safe.
Oh, and the inspection by the mine's insurers that was completed days before the event. And a Department of Labour inspection within the preceding weeks. Whittall's not just saying that the mine was safe, he's got the (hopefully demanding) inspection report from the people who have money on the line if safety practices at the mine aren't up to scratch. Insurers tend to be bloody-minded about risk exposure to themselves, as one expects.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Except that, as we've heard, they don't actually know for certain where any of them were working. They know rough areas, but that's about it. It could be two groups, four groups, one group. I was a bit disturbed to learn that they know so little about the movement of men inside a dark, hazardous hole, TBPH, but at least they knew who was in there. So without knowing where in the mine any given man should've been, it's hard to know if they were where they were "meant" to be when they died.
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testing methane levels on a continual basis. How is it done? Can it even be done? Are there tricks or tools that can be used to detect it even with just a moderate level of certainty?
It can definitely be done, because there are portable hydrocarbon detectors. The Fire Service use them. One of the factors in the IcePack incident was that the gas detector normally on the pump/rescue tender that attended was in for maintenance so there was no equipment on hand to check for gas.
Doesn’t [methane] have a distinctive smell?
Nope. Odourless. An odorant is added to commercial gas supply for safety.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Depending how long it takes to recover the bodies, even that analysis may not be possible. If it's months from now, a difference of a few days may not be distinguishable. There's also the environmental consideration of temperature, etc, which isn't easily calculable, and I would imagine does matter rather a lot. Certainly the CSI guys make a big deal of working out the ambient environment when pontificating on time of death, even with Grissom's bugs