Cigarette lighters underground, plastic bags over methane sensors and a culture of white hats versus green hats were other issues raised at the inquiry into the tragedy.

Pike River Coal’s safety and training coordinator Adrian Couchman was questioned for the entire day.

In a tough start, Couchman admitted he had no previous experience in the mining industry before working for PRC and was not aware of the responsibilities and actions required for his role until he was shown the documentation that morning.

“I did most of the tasks related in this that I’m looking at here and what I read through this morning yes, that’s correct,” Couchman said early into the hearing.

Describing meetings with management, Couchman said his colleague Rockhouse found them to be extremely stressful affairs.

“On one occasion Neville came back from a meeting that went for quite some time and he had actually changed colour. He’d actually gone a sort of a grey, very pale colour. He was obviously under a lot of duress when he was coming back from that particular meeting,” he said.

During his time at PRC, Couchman revealed that Rockhouse resigned on two occasions but was talked out of it by managers, friends and family.

Speaking about their daily interaction, Couchman said they both talked quite often about the fact they were under resourced.

During his Pike days, Couchman delivered induction training. He previously submitted statements about his concerns over the lack of induction and training for contractors and their employees before they went underground.

Based on his observations in 2010, Couchman designed a more encompassing five-day induction process to overcome this issue which was well received by management.

However, there was a decision to start this course up in February, 2011.

On this delay, Couchman said it was mainly because the feedback he was getting from managers was that there were a considerable number of contractors on site at the time.

“It would’ve actually taken up a lot of time to get them fully trained, or put them through a five-day process,” he said.

“When we were in full coal production there would have been a lot less reliance on contractors at that stage.”

He also confirmed there were occurrences of trainees working at the face – although they had to spend one year underground before they could apply to become a “fully fledged miner”.

Considerable time was spent on some of the more concerning reported incidents at Pike River, with Couchman revealing that the I Am Safe program booklets did tend to get used as part of an incident and accident reporting system out of convenience.

Under questioning yesterday, and earlier as part of police investigations, Couchman said he was not aware of the number of methane sensor interferences.

“At my police interview that asked me that question, were you aware of this issue and were you aware of that situation. I was not aware, for example, I wasn’t aware of the plastic bag one, apparently it was raised that they were covering them up with plastic bags, I was not aware of that. So a lot of those issues weren’t raised with me,” he said.

But interference with methane monitoring sensors was a known issue at Pike River.

“We did put out numerous toolbox talks and newsflashes not to interfere with ventilation or with methane monitoring devices,” Couchman said.

“We were constantly advising staff, underground staff that they were not to, they were there for their protection and that they needed to leave them alone.”

In another reported incident brought to light yesterday, a deputy wrote about how he arrived at a coalface to find a compressed air hose turned off.

“Turned off and directed towards methane gas detector given false reading for methane sensor and risk of static electricity spark,” the deputy reported.

Asked whether any disciplinary action was taken, Couchman said he was not aware of any significant follow up.

“When I got to that particular site there was nobody there. The site had been vacated so I was actually doing an audit of the mine at the time with one of the deputies and he took me to that site and showed me that particular situation and scenario. We pulled it down and turned it off and then reported it.”

Couchman said it was put through the “normal” report processing.

“I’m not aware of what occurred in terms of the investigation after that.”

With health and safety committees, Couchman had previously raised his “personal” concerns that they were overwhelmingly attended by management, which may have intimidated miners from raising issues.

“Nothing really constructive was done at those particular meetings,” he said.

Couchman shed light on why miners did not attend at least some of these committees in strong numbers.

“I didn't disagree with the point principle of having a senior manager in attendance to, you know, to answer questions or to get to see how the safety committee worked, but what was happening was that we were sometimes getting managers filling in for their so-called safety rep because they couldn't release them from work.”

When asked whether PRC chief executive Peter Whittall had discussed union involvement in the health and safety committee, Couchman revealed more detail.

“In the initial inaugural setup of the health and safety committed, the comment was made to us that he [Whittall] didn't want to see the union’s influence grow in the health and safety committee.”

A safety achievement Couchman did clock up in the “early days” was in the workplace culture stakes. Back then the management and technical staff were easy to spot by their white helmets.

“The mining staff wore green helmets, so they were referred to [as] white hats versus green hats,” he said.

“We did away with that by removing all the helmets at one stage and went to the blue helmets, so everybody had a blue helmet.”