Miners rescued from Zimbabwe’s Redwing mine

Rescuers on Sunday pulled out all 15 subsistence miners who had been trapped in an underground shaft at Redwing mine in Zimbabwe after it collapsed on Thursday, said a government spokesperson.

The miners were trapped after a collapse of ground structures at the mine 270km east of the capital, Harare.

”All miners were rescued alive,” government spokesperson Nick Mangwana said.

Bloomberg reported Zimbabwe’s mines minister, Soda Zhemu, as saying in a telephone interview from the scene of the rescue: “They are all okay and very conscious.”

The rescue operation had been delayed due to unstable ground, according to Metallon Gold, which owns Redwing.

Video footage posted on social media platform X by Mangwana showed the workers, covered in mud, being greeted by a small but jubilant crowd at the mine site.

Formal mining operations at Redwing have been undertaken by subsistence miners carrying out unsanctioned work since the mine was placed under corporate rescue in 2020, the company said.

Metallon Corporation has said earlier that the rescue team it had deployed made several rescue attempts but it was hampered by unstable ground, which made the retrieval operations unsafe.

Mine accidents are not uncommon in Zimbabwe.

Al Jazeera reports that for years many unemployed young men in Zimbabwe’s gold-rich areas have been earning a living by working in unregulated mines with little to no safety measures or procedures.

At least nine people died in September after the collapse of Bay Horse Mine, a disused gold mine in Chegutu, about 110km west of Harare.