adminJohannesburg — Harmony Gold Mining Co. (HAR) said eight workers are dead and one is missing after a rockfall triggered a blaze more than a mile underground at its Doornkop site in South Africa’s worst gold company accident for five-and-a-half years. “The search continues for the ninth employee,” the Johannesburg-based company said today in a statement. Operations at the mine west of the city are suspended.
Search and rescue and deep-level firefighting teams were deployed at about 6 pm on Tuesday after the fire broke out 1,733 metres below the surface, according to the company. Eight trapped miners were found in a refuge chamber and brought out unharmed yesterday.
The fire started when a tremor with a magnitude of 2.4 caused a rock fall that damaged power cables, according to the National Union of Mineworkers, which said ventilation and water pipes were also affected. There were 112 deaths in the country’s mining industry in 2012, according to the Chamber of Mines.
While Johannesburg flourished after the discovery of gold in 1886 the stress that the mining has placed on underground rock formations has increased seismic activity.
“There’s nothing about a seismic event that one can really do,” Franz Stehring, head of mining at the union Uasa, said in a phone interview. Investigators will be checking whether the workers had their rescue packs, which supply enough oxygen for 60 minutes, whether the rescue bays work and whether the workers knew where to find the refuges, he said.
Once the biggest gold producer, South Africa now has some of the world’s deepest mines as aging deposits prompt companies to dig deeper to reach ore.
The Doornkop incident is the worst in the local industry since nine miners died after the cable of a shaft elevator snapped on May 1, 2008, at Gold Fields Ltd.’s South Deep mine.
It’s the most Harmony employees to die in an incident in the company’s history. At least 82 illegal miners died at a disused mineshaft owned by Harmony, South Africa’s third-largest gold producer, in Free State province in 2009.
“We pass our deepest condolences to the families of the deceased,” Erick Gcilitshana, the NUM’s health and safety secretary, said in a statement. “One death is one death too many.”
When the last missing Harmony worker is found, the search and rescue team will need to make sure the fire has been extinguished before an inspection can be done, South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources said in a statement. The department will determine its next steps after the inspection.
Doornkop, about 30km from Johannesburg, produced 3,631 kilogrammes of gold in 2013, according to Harmony’s website. The single-shaft mine at a depth of just under 2,000 meters accounts for about 10 percent of the company’s South African production. There were two fatalities at Doornkop in 2012 and none last year.
Harmony fell 4,5 percent to 29,59 rand in Johannesburg trading at 12:55 p.m. The FTSE/JSE Africa Gold Mining Index was 0,9 percent lower.
South Africa’s deadliest mining incident was in 1960, when 437 miners were killed at the Coalbrook North Colliery after being trapped by a rock fall, according to the website of state-owned power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. In 1986, an underground fire killed 177 miners at the country’s Kinross gold mine. — Bloomberg
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