Royal Commission of Inquiry commissioner Stewart Bell, head of Mine Safety and Health for Queensland, yesterday grilled the top policeman in charge of the Pike River rescue about why he did not let a mining expert lead part of the rescue effort.
The police appointed themselves in charge, and held all the main control positions at the mine, in Greymouth and in Wellington, with more than 300 staff involved.
However, at times, crucial information took days to reach police headquarters in Wellington, where key decisions were made well away from the mining experts gathered at the mine site.
Mr Bell said he was surprised Assistant Commissioner Grant Nicholls did not transfer incident control - a post held by Superintendent Gary Knowles in Greymouth - to a specialist on the ground, as would have happened in other countries.
"Why wasn't there a first-class coal person on that expert panel in Wellington?" Mr Bell asked.
To earn that qualification, people were tested in emergency situations.
Mr Nicholls said in hindsight, having such a person on the panel advising the police would have been useful.
"If you look at the range of people available ... on the ground, there was a lot of expertise there that could have been brought to bear," Mr Bell said, prompting mutterings of "hear, hear" from family members in the public gallery.
Commission head Justice Graham Panckhurst then suggested Mr Nicholls had gone against the incident management guidelines by himself making operational decisions.
If the policy was followed, Supt Knowles in Greymouth should have done that.
"Can you not see ... scope for the view that the police should be the lead agency in a major exercise such as this, but that when it comes to incident controller ... that that person might need to come from an outside agency, like Mines Rescue Service ... to bring that technical expertise?" Justice Panckhurst said.
The commission yesterday learned news of the existence of footage of the explosion taken from the portal, the exact number of people underground, and the potential use of the GAG machine to make the mine inert took days to reach Wellington.
