A siren blares emergency, emergency – then eerie silence

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Arriving at the Mount Clear gold mine on Wednesday, Ross Kenna was confronted with a chaotic scene. Trapped workers, emergency services and everyone fearing the worst.

Ross Kenna had knocked off work on Wednesday evening when a miner called to tell him there had been a rock collapse at Ballarat Gold Mine. The details were blurry but Kenna’s heart sank.

Twenty-eight miners remained underground in a safety pod, where they had sought refuge when the emergency warning sounded. “They would have known straight away that it was something serious. To be called an emergency means it’s fire, collapse, earthquake,” Kenna says. “They would have known that it was deadly serious.”

Hourigan and the injured 21-year-old, who remains in The Alfred hospital in a critical condition, had been mining using a process known as “air legging”, in which a cylinder operated by compressed air is used to keep a rock drill pressed into the hole being drilled. In 2022 Terry Hogan died due to a rockfall while performing air-leg mining work at Gold Fields’ St Ives mine, 80 kilometres south of Kalgoorlie.

Kenna says they were disappointed. The union wanted to warn men that if they weren’t feeling right, they didn’t need to drive, and there would be taxis or buses. They wanted to warn them there would also be media at the gate, pointing cameras in their faces.“This is where the union movement comes in. There’ll be a heap for us to do in making sure before any mining starts again that the work site is safe.

 

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