The Pike River recovery Agency is confident the re-entry of the mine will be completed by June, given there is no unexpected delays.
“It's an estimate based on what we know now, and we always stress that because it's based on conditions as we currently understand them. But we've still got an awful lot of work to do and it has taken longer, particularly, to recover the last part of the drift,” says agency chief executive Dave Gawn.
“But as we understand it now, we estimate towards the end of June we should be in a position to start thinking about handing it back to DOC.”
That is when work will begin on a memorial site.
A separate track will be made to link the mine site itself with New Zealand’s latest Great Walk, the Paparoa Track.
1 NEWS reporter Lisa Davies, who covered the breaking news a decade ago, spend the day with families on the West Coast.
There’s also plans to turn the portal entrance to the mine into a memorial and education space.
“The families have been working with DOC to establish something that actually tells the story of Pike, and, as I say, it'll be both a learning centre, a journey, but also an appropriate memorial to just reflect and remember,” says Gawn.
“The final handover to DOC completes this mandate that the Government have given us to recover the drift in order to find out what happened and try and establish some facts and perhaps get some closure for the families and for the rest of New Zealand for that matter.”
But there’s still some work to do.
It’s been a time of reflection today for the families of the 29 men who died 10 years ago in New Zealand’s worst mining disaster.
First a ventilation control device will be built, to ensure the team has control over the mine’s environment as the next phase of the recovery begins.
“Once that is built, a team will then go through those man doors in breathing apparatuses and tunnel through the rocsil plug through to recover the last eight metres to the actual rock fall,” Gawn says.
“On completion of that, we'll withdraw, close the ventilation control device, the doors, and we will then move back to pit bottom and stone to recover what is the critical area in terms of forensics.
“That’s the area where all of the electrical transmission stations are, the pumping stations — that sort of thing. Again, we're not sure how long that will take. It will be done under the guidance and with police experts, but we anticipate around about three months for that.“
Recovery workers have reached the foam seal near the end of the 2.3km tunnel.
Just before Christmas, and in the final milestone of 2020, the recovery team reached near the end of the mine drift — 349 days after the 170-metre seal was broken.
Workers reached the rocsil plug, a remote ventilation plug made of foam, that sits 2244 metres up the mine drift.
Now the mine has been put into care and maintenance, before the next stage of the recovery begins on January 5th.
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