The head of a New Zealand coal mine where 29 men are missing after an explosion defended its safety record Monday, saying it operated as safely as possible in a hazardous environment.
The Pike River mine taps Brunner coal seam on the South Island's rugged west coast, a source of high-quality coking coal but one which also has a history of explosive methane gas linked to at least two other disasters in the area.
Pike River Coal chief executive Peter Whittall said the mine had systems in place to minimise the risk from methane gas.
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"It's certainly a hazard of the mine, but to say it's prone to risk is to say it's happened before, or it happens all the time. It doesn't," he told reporters.
Whittall, a career miner, said it was the first mine he had worked in where there had been an explosion.
"This is a unique event to this operation," he said.
"What I would say though, is that at the time of the incident there was an unsafe situation. That goes without saying, otherwise it wouldn't have occurred.
"It doesn't say the mine was operated unsafely."
He said the mine's safety officer, Neville Rockhouse, had two sons working in the mine -- one of them, Daniel, escaped after Friday's blast, the other, Ben, is among those trapped.
"Neville would not let us work in an unsafe mine," Whittall said.
The Pike River mine uses a 2.5 kilometre (1.5 mile) tunnel running beneath the Paparoa mountains to reach the Brunner seam, which was discovered in 1864 and is the foundation of the west coast's coal mining industry.
In 1896, an explosion killed 65 miners at the Brunner mine in New Zealand's worst mining disaster. In 1967 another blast killed 19 people at the Strongman mine, which was sited just across the Paparoa range from Pike River.
David Bell, a geologist at the South Island's Canterbury University, said a fault running through the Pike River mine shaft allowed pockets of methane to build up and he doubted anyone survived the blast.
"It seems to me that there's been a significant methane explosion underground," Bell told Fairfax Media.
"I don't believe the guys down there have got a hope. I've got to be perfectly honest, it's most unlikely somebody has managed to survive that, but I hope like hell they all survived."
