20 years on from the Beaconsfield mine collapse, survivor Brant Webb says he still suffers nightmares but chooses to focus on the good memories.
The collapse happened on April 25, 2006, when a small earthquake triggered a rockfall nearly a kilometre underground at the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in northern Tasmania.
Miner Larry Knight was killed. Webb and fellow miner Todd Russell were trapped for 14 days before being rescued on May 9, 2006.
Speaking to New Idea from his home in Tasmania, Webb said the experience had left a lasting mark.
“The mind is a magnificent thing,” Webb told the magazine.
“It makes you forget all the bad things and remember all the good things.”
“There are a lot of good things to remember and there are a lot of bad things I try not to remember.”
Webb said the disaster had shaped the way he lived his life.
“I went to work that day, thinking I was coming home and I didn’t make it home for a couple of weeks,” he said.
“You just never know what’s going to happen – Larry never made it home.”
Paramedic Karen Pendrey, who was the first to speak with the trapped miners through a communication pipe, told Woman’s Day she still remembered the rescue as an extraordinary team effort.
Pendrey spent 12-hour shifts talking with Webb and Russell before her paramedic husband Daryl took over. Both later received bravery awards.
“They seemed to be in pretty good spirits,” Pendrey said.
“They’d just been found and they thought they would get out pretty quickly.”
Former Southern Cross newsreader and now Tasmanian MLC Jo Palmer, who represents Rosevears, said the story remained one of the most unforgettable of her career.
“Hour by hour more news came through and it was devastating,” Palmer said.
“We thought lives had been lost, but we didn’t know how many and we didn’t know who.”
Palmer said the response from locals was just as memorable as the rescue.
“That event showed the absolute resilience of the Beaconsfield and West Tamar community,” she said.
A coronial inquest handed down in February 2009 found the rockfall was caused by seismic shakedown following a magnitude 2.3 seismic event.
Coroner Rod Chandler criticised the mine’s ground support system and found Workplace Standards Tasmania’s inspectorate was grossly understaffed.
The Beaconsfield mine closed in 2012.
Webb and Russell never worked underground again.
