By Richard Healey
West Coast · The feasibility study for manned reentry to the fan space at Pike River is complete. It’s release will happen very soon. This work has been carried out at zero cost to the New Zealand taxpayer by a group of eminent international mining experts. Everyone in this country owes those selfless men a debt of gratitude for the massive effort entailed in its creation. It’s incredibly important that the public understand that police proposal to use bore holes to look within the mine has two fatal flaws.
1: Boreholes are a very poor tool for forensic examination. You can take photos, but only from a single point of view. You can view objects, but you can’t take samples – nor can you turn things over, dismantle them or move things out of the way. You can’t see inside things or behind things.
2: The police say they are looking for evidence – but there is a good chance that they will just bury it instead. Drilling holes into the roof of a tunnel that has already been weakened by explosions creates the risk that the roof will collapse. That’s exactly what has happened at borehole 50 (pictured below) – a borehole that’s only metres away. If the roof collapses then the coverup at Pike River is complete.
We have presented the police with two options for getting access to the fan space, horizontal drilling from within the drift and manned reentry, that do not carry the risk of roof collapse. They have chosen to ignore our proposals. Now one of those proposals has been comprehensively studied. Here’s a couple of photos of what Police and others have persisted in describing as “a massive rockfall”.
Three things we can say about it – it’s not massive, we can see no rock and there is a void, metres high, above a large chunk of it. If you want the truth read the report. If you’ve already sold your soul over this then step aside and let us get on with it.
Link to the report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MVz-qjLjgrNs45VWZjJy1ZSyAABAu8jn/view?fbclid=IwAR0Tepq_xgAqYMX-cuK-mKtYQCiYbqE_EjYUfipYpPXOT42JEHOohcNqSvs
If you cannot access the report (ie locked) click on the blue button to request it.
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