By DPA
Johannesburg : Deeper, dearer, riskier – gold production in South Africa comes at a price, not just for mining companies but for the safety of mineworkers.
Gold mining in South Africa began in the area around Johannesburg known as The Reef in 1886. The discovery of a seam of gold deposits led to the establishment of a bustling modern city, called City of Gold(Egoli) in Zulu.
Gold quickly became a mainstay of the economy, helped by the plentiful supply of cheap mine labour under the apartheid regime.
Today, nearly 100,000 people are employed in gold mining and gold contributes around five percent of South Africa’s gross domestic product.
But gold mining, compared to diamond mining, which some in the industry refer to “as gentlemen’s mining” because it is mostly opencast, has always been a risky business.
An accident that left 3,200 miners trapped underground Wednesday has focused renewed scrutiny on the industry as rescuers slowly brought the workers out another shaft after the main shaft was damaged.
Of the around 199 people killed last year in South African mines, 113 died in gold mining operations.
And workers don’t look to be out of the woods yet. Record low yields – gold production in South Africa in 2006 fell under 257 tonnes for the first time since 1922 – is driving gold producers further underground in search of new seams.
The falling yields have been partly offset by record gold prices over the past year. On Tuesday, gold hit a nearly 28-year high of $747.75 an ounce.
These higher prices add further incentive to forage further nderground, but mining at up to and more than four kilometres underground is technically challenging, extremely costly and risky for workers.
The deeper miners go, the greater the risk of seismic activity. Tremors cause the rock falls that are responsible for most of the mine deaths in the country each year, according to the National Union of ineworkers (NUM).
Gold Fields, the country’s second-biggest gold producer after AngloGold Ashanti, is preparing to go as deep as 4,121 metres at its Driefontein mine, setting a new record.
A worker was killed at Driefontein mine earlier this month after a tremor at 3,000 metres below.
Unions say that worker safety is being held hostage to profitability and have threatened to strike over the companies’ failure to go some way towards meeting a targeted 20 percent year-on-year decrease in mining deaths from 2003.
In 2004, mining deaths were down 16 percent, but in 2005 and 2006 the figure remained mired at around 200 deaths. The death toll to date this year, with nearly three months to go, stands at 205, according to NUM.
“When it comes to production targets, the companies make no mistakes in meeting them, but when it comes to safety, we hear rhetoric and philosophy,” said Peter Bailey, NUM’s national chairperson for health and safety.
From a technical point of view, mining at below 4,000 metres also poses a string of challenges. For every 33 metres deeper into the ground, the air temperature rises by one degree Celsius. Daytime temperatures can reach 59 degrees, ground water is steaming hot and humidity is close to 100 percent.
Companies estimate that, even with high-speed elevators, miners will spend up to three hours out of their shift just getting up and down the shaft.
Evacuating miners from those depths in emergencies, and keeping equipment and workers cool require costly, high-tech solutions.
And still many mining companies are using decades-old equipment. The bursting of a 30-year-old water pipe is thought to have been the cause of Wednesday’s accident at Harmony Gold’s Elandsrand mine, which left 3,200 workers stranded underground, some for more than a day.