Pike River survivor five years on: 'I'm alive. That's the way to look at it'

Friday, 13 November 2015

This Thursday, November 19, Russell Smith will get up and go to work.

The 55-year-old is employed in the offal room at the ANZCO meatworks at Kokiri, about 20 minutes drive east of Greymouth. It is his third job in five years.

Before that he drove heavy machinery at the Oceana gold mine near Reefton, until he got laid off.

Before that he was a coal cutter at the Pike River underground mine. The last day he worked there an explosion nearly killed him. He struggled out of the mine with the help of colleague Daniel Rockhouse, lucky to be alive. Twenty-nine other men in the mine died.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of the tragedy and Smith doesn't have anything special planned.

'I'll be going to work, I suppose,' he said.

'I'll just be thinking away to myself a lot. I'm not too sure what's happening around the township. I'll go to work and just dwell on things . . . and mope on it. That's what I'll be doing.'

In the five years since the disaster Smith has mostly opted out of the Pike River aftermath – a twisting saga of investigations, inquests, claims, counter-claims, hope and despair. He rarely attends families meetings about Pike and, after the initial media frenzy, has largely stayed out of the limelight.

'I just wanted to get away from media and get away from it all,' he said, of the months after the disaster.

'My wife would quite often go to the meetings and I would sort of lay low to keep out of it. It felt like you were just repeating the same thing over and over again.

'I'll only go there if I know there's something really important happening. What they're doing on the day, all that sort of stuff, I sort of lose contact with what's happening.'

Smith prefers to keep to himself. In the days and weeks after the explosion, he spent much of his time walking the tracks around his home, overlooking the beach in the Greymouth suburb of Cobden. It gave him time to think and time to be alone.

'Nobody [has] hardly ever seen a tear to my eye,' he said.

'Even my wife. I'd just shoot over to this section next door and there was no one there and then you'd picture their faces and start thinking about it. That's when you'd get the tears.'

The tears were good, because they were for his friends. Think about Pike River too much, though, and you start to 'dwell' and 'mope' on it.

'You might think [about] what has happened since and that 'just gets you bloody wild,' Smith said.

Bloody wild. Like so many people affected by Pike, ask Smith about what happened before and after the explosion and the temperature in the room rises – a dangerous mine blew up and nobody has been held to account for it.

'Just a waste of lives,' Smith said, 'It should never have happened.'

'If you start thinking about it you just get angry. I honestly think the families of everybody should get together and prosecute the Government. It's them that's responsible for it.'

His memory of the day has started to come back. He remembers more of how he felt, which hasn't helped the angerlevels.

'I can kind of remember the mouth of the mine and getting out there and there was no one around and thinking, 'This is just typical'.Just how the place was run. You got out there and there was nothing there.'

Smith emerged from the mine, with Rockhouse's help, nearly two hours after the blast. Before that, he remembers the force of the explosion and struggling to use his self-rescuer until a 'peacefulness' came over him. An electrician who ventured into the tunnel was the first to find him.

'He said I was lying starfish, head downhill, looking straight up in the air. He honestly thought I was dead and his machine was cutting out and he just had to try and save himself and reverse out as quick as he could.

'When Rocky came towards me he said I was like in the praying position. I'd obviously got up a bit. He pulled my hair back and my eyes were rolling around so I was obviously coming around.'

The pair made it out and Smith's post-Pike life began. He was off work for nearly three months before starting at the gold mine. The days were long there. Up at 3.30am, home at 7.30pm. Three years took its toll.

'I was pale as a ghost,' Smith said.

'You'd gain a bit of weight.You'd go down the street and someone would see you who hadn't seen you for a while and they'd say, 'Man, you just look like shit.''

Eventually he was laid off – the mine is set to close at the end of the year – and spent another three months out of work.

'I applied for seven jobs and only one ever got back to me. I was lucky to get into the meatworks. She's pretty bad over here employment-wise.'

Despite nearly dying, the hard work, the lay off, the anger, the survivor guilt (his wife, Jo, feels that too) and his friends who are still down the mine, Smith is happy. It's the only thing he can be.

'I'm alive,' he said.

'That's the way to look at it.'