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While Australia’s 44 underground coal mines have an enviable safety reputation built on rigorous attention to safety protocols and advancements in technology, Cameron warned that it needed to remain vigilant to avoid a disaster on the scale of Pike River.
“It's clearly something that does shake us all up, it's just very cruel,” he said.
“Hopefully it doesn't take something like this to make us just remember how important this issue is 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Australia’s last multiple fatality accident underground was in 1996 at Gretley in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales in which four men died.
While the Australian mining industry could “be proud of its more recent safety record”, an estimated 4000 men and boys had died in coal mines since white settlement in Australia, Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union general secretary Andrew Vickers said.
“We've demanded that the legislation be upgraded to put in place the safety precautions that we've learnt from the proper investigations of those disasters and the legislation now reflects the safety measures that are in place as a consequence of the lessons learnt from those disasters,” he said.
Controlling and managing gas underground to reduce an environmental footprint remains an ongoing challenge and Centennial is developing ways of utilising that gas for energy production at its Mandalong mine in NSW.
“Some coal mines, though not all, release methane as you mine the seam,” Cameron told the ABC.
"Methane is an explosive gas in certain proportions with air and so we have to make sure that we dilute that methane as it's slowly released and it goes out with the ventilation air, out with the mine air and it therefore isn't hanging around and capable of being ignited."
Cameron repeated that mine safety was needed for the ongoing sustainability of the coal mining industry in Australia.
“Promulgating safety, it's got to be the first and foremost issue in all our minds, in every decision we make in our industry, in everything we do day by day,” he said.
