About 950 workers are trapped underground at Sibanye-Stillwater’s Beatrix gold mine in the Free State, after an overnight power failure cause by a lightning strike.
Rescue efforts are under way, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, AMCU, said on Thursday, February 1, 2018.
At least 40 workers had been brought back to the surface at the gold mine, with 950 miners still below ground at 3 Shaft at Beatrix, the union said.
Sibanye said a power pylon had been knocked over during a storm on Wednesday night, cutting power to 4 Shaft and the main Beatrix operations of 2 and 3 Shafts. Power had since been restored to 4 Shaft and people hauled to surface.
Power was restored to 2 Shaft and workers were hoisted to the surface there on Thursday.
Sibanye wanted 950 workers at 3 Shaft to wait there until the winder serving the shaft was back in working order, rather than have hundreds of people walking for four hours to 2 Shaft, said company spokesperson James Wellsted.
No one had been injured, he said, and the company was supplying food and water to the workers trapped underground at 3 Shaft by deploying a capsule down the shaft, he said. The proto-team, or professional rescue team, was with the trapped miners, he said.
There was no immediate timeline of when the workers would be returned to surface, he said.
“The department’s inspectors are on site providing support and advice on the rescue operation following a power outage, which resulted in mine workers being trapped underground,” the Department of Mineral Resources said.
Harmony said it was providing generators from the nearby Joel mine to assist the rescue efforts at Beatrix.
On the whole, gold mining companies have been successful in safely bringing trapped workers to safety in situations like this. Harmony Gold brought 3,200 workers to surface at its Elandsrand gold mine in 2007, after a shaft was damaged and power supply to a main working area was halted.
In 2015, Harmony safely brought 486 miners to the surface after an underground fire at its Kusasalethu mine.
AMCU flagged concern for the health of the 950 workers, citing a lack of food and medication for those who needed it.
“This incident also raises serious concern regarding the lacking emergency contingency plans at the mine for alternative and back-up power generation,” AMCU said.
“Surely this cannot be acceptable and best practice. AMCU insists that the mine should have its own back-up arrangements for this kind of contingency,” it said.
The National Union of Mineworkers also expressed concern for trapped workers’ health, and called for tough measures to be taken against Sibanye and other companies where miners are hurt or killed.
“We call on the [Department of Mineral Resources] inspectorate to hold the mining industry fully accountable for its failures and adopt a no-nonsense approach when it comes to injuries and fatalities in the mining industry,” the union said.
Sibanye expected the damaged powerline to be repaired shortly and that it would begin using its main winder at 3 Shaft to hoist the stranded miners to surface in a process that would take about an hour.
Sibanye was installing a generator to power a smaller winder at the shaft and that could be used if the powerline was not repaired in the next few hours. The smaller winder would take about three hours to bring everyone underground back to the surface, Wellsted said.
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