The memorial to those who died in the 1896 Brunner mine explosion

The explosion at the Pike River mine near Greymouth is a sad reminder that underground coal mining will always be highly dangerous work. Wherever there is coal there is also likely to be methane, or firedamp as miners call it. Methane is given off by coal and is highly combustible.

Te Ara’s entry on coal and coal mining lists the major losses of life from mining accidents in this country, all but two of them caused by explosions from firedamp. The major disasters were:

• Kaitangata in south Otago, 1879, when 34 miners died from an explosion.
• Brunner on the West Coast, 1896, when 65 were killed from choking gas. This was the largest death toll from any New Zealand industrial accident.
• Ralph’s mine, Huntly, 1913, when a firedamp explosion killed 43.
• Dobson mine on the West Coast, 1926, when an explosion killed 9.
• Glen Afton mine, Huntly, 1939, when 11 were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.
• Strongman mine, also on the coast, 1967, when 19 died following an explosion.

Yet, although the scale of these accidents is horrifying, our entry reminds us that in fact many miners, perhaps more in total, have died through individual accidents than in the mass tragedies. From 1900 to 1914, 98 individual miners lost their lives.  We also include a list of individual mining deaths at Denniston north of Westport.  It shows that in the 25 years from 1881 to 1906, 26 people died from mining – more than one a year.  Some were killed by falls of rock or coal; others lost their lives on the famous incline, hit by runaway trucks or in the case of Charles Ribey, by ‘a moment of absent-mindedness’.  Only one lost his life from an explosion of the type which caused the mass explosions.

With danger of accident and death ever-present, the coal mines spawned a tight and protective community, which the present tragedy has again highlighted.

At this time all our sympathies are with the families and friends of the 29 miners at Pike River.

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Te Ara meets Web 2.0

Te Ara invites your contributions

Te Ara wants you!

So that more of you can help us build Te Ara, we’ve added three new features: a blog, a Flickr group and ‘your stories‘.

Recently, there has been some public discussion about whether, as the internet becomes more interactive, Te Ara is an old-fashioned beast because it isn’t a user-generated site like Wikipedia or Flickr. We make no apologies for the fact that we commission entries from experts in their fields, nor that we search the archives of the country for the most appropriate images and film clips we can find, because the end results are full, accurate and richly resourced. Not to diminish the tremendous resource that Wikipedia is, but you will see the difference if you compare, for example, Te Ara’s entries on Ngāti Porou or Moa with the Ngāti Porou and Moa entries in Wikipedia.

But we do recognise the importance of encouraging users to interact with Te Ara and help build it. Right from the beginning Te Ara went out to the community and invited people to send in stories on particular subjects. You’ll find some great contributions in the entries on The voyage out and Beachcombing, for example.

And now we want to encourage even more people to contribute to Te Ara through our new features.

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