SA’s mining problem is one that runs deep
As the marathon platinum strike continues to threaten mining in SA, Ray Hartley visits a deep-level mine to experience what it’s like to mine gold in the bowels of the earth
THREE-and-a-half kilometres underground, no one can hear you scream, I tell myself as the drills hammer their way through solid rock.
I am at the deepest point of Driefontein’s No 5 shaft, west of Johannesburg.
It is a work environment like no other. A rock-drill operator named Whitey is king. His kingdom is a jagged tunnel known as a panel, blasted out of the battleship-grey rock where the gold lies.
The panel’s low roof forces you into a crouch. The inclined floor is covered with loose rock, the detritus of previous advances into the earth. The rockface temperature approaches 60°C, and although mines are required to cool the stopes to about 28°C, humidity approaching 100% causes continuous and heavy perspiration. It is a cramped, claustrophobic space shared by strippeddown workers, rusted drilling machines and rock fragments.
Around Whitey, helmeted mineworkers toil in a strange, slow silence. Some spray-paint red dots on the rockface where holes must be drilled for blasting. Others attach air and water hoses to his rust-brown drilling machine, which has ‘‘AK47” as a nickname.
Earplugs seem a pathetic defence against the screaming, grinding and crunching of the drill bit as it fights its way into the rock, and water sprays from the stuttering machine.
When the hole is finally deep enough, the crouching crew and Whitey move on to the next site.
Talk of replacing these workers with machines suddenly seems ludicrous. This, I realise, is the only way to get gold out of the ground at this depth.
Men, drilling machines and hard, hard labour under hundreds of tons of rock with the sweat pouring off their bodies in rivers.
When the holes have been drilled, explosive charges are placed in them and stopped up. The area will be cleared, and the charges detonated.
The blast will shatter the face of the panel, freeing shards of rock. That rock will be carried by people and machines to the surface where it will be crushed to free tiny bits of gold.
To get to the panel, I had to put on safety gear: overalls, boots, knee guards, elbow guards, helmet, light and emergency breathing apparatus.
Then I stood in a dark, rattling cage as it descended 1.7km down one shaft. After a short walk, I went into another cage and descended a further 1.8km.
I realised that I had just travelled the same distance as my morning commute from Parkview to Rose- bank through Joburg’s tree-lined streets. It seems ludicrous that I had travelled the same distance straight down into the earth in cages suspended on steel cables.
About 3.5km underground, I had travelled a further 1.7 km across on a rudimentary yellow rail car to arrive at the tunnels that wind their way to where Whitey is preparing the rock face for blasting.
Along the way, blasts of cold air relayed down from the surface by giant refrigeration units fight against the mounting heat.
Electrical and communications cables run along the rough walls covered in mesh to prevent rock falls. The tunnels are surprisingly brightly lit and well maintained. Every day about 10 000 litres of water are pumped out of the dolomite layer above the shafts at 48 pump stations to avert flooding.
The object of all this engineering ingenuity, capital investment and hard labour can clearly be seen on the wall of the panel where the miners toil. Slithering its way down into the earth is a glittering seam of crushed pebbles and hardened organic matter — a cross-section of an ancient seabed compressed by centuries of pressure into gold-yielding ore.
The glitter in the seam comes from the worthless mineral iron pyrites. But it is a clue that there is real gold lying hidden in dark veins of compressed organic matter which surround the compacted pebbles.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, these pebbles were eroded, with the gold from volcanic rocks, and together with the gold were transported by turbulent rivers, before being deposited at the bottom of a large inland sea. They were covered by successive layers of sand, stone and lava.
About 220 million years ago, a massive meteorite smashed into the Witwatersrand, tilting the reef so that one end rose to the surface, making its contents discoverable by people.
South Africa’s ever-deepening gold mines are the result of the relentless quest to chase this and other seams lying parallel to it deeper and deeper into the earth.
As this downward chase continued, it became more and more expensive to extract the rock, leading to more and more “marginal” mining operations where the rise and fall of the gold price determines whether or not it is viable to mine.
The Driefontein mine is at the cutting edge of the debate on the future of mining. It has so far produced about 105 million ounces of gold — worth about R1,4-trillion in today’s money. It has another 10 or 15 years of mining to go.
It’s impossible to ask Whitey what he thinks of his job, but a short distance away in a waiting area I meet Theko Hafo, also a rock driller. He has spent much of his waking life in these tunnels deep under the earth. He comes from Lesotho, and has worked two other mines. He is 41, and seems physically slight for this type of work. Apart from the locals, there are workers from Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana.
“I get what I need for the job,” he tells me. His needs are simple — a modest house and schooling for his children. As I am accompanied by mine management it is perhaps not surprising that he has no criticism of the working conditions.
Like the mines on the strike-bound platinum belt, the workers here are represented by the upstart union Amcu. I meet the local chairman, Thabang Molete, who is more candid.
“We are not going to strike, but we are working hard and we earn nothing. We need a living wage,” he says. “I can’t send my child to university, I can’t buy a car. I work in a dangerous place,” he says, casting his eyes upwards at the threatening rock overhead. I ask him what he earns. “I get out R2 000,” he says.
This is far below the lowest wage paid to miners — a figure that is hard to pin down as it depends on shifts worked and bonuses — but it is the all-important figure to a miner.
The many deductions made by employers or, perhaps more tellingly, those due to garnishee orders that result from defaulting on microlending payments, are not considered part of the pay package. What counts is what the worker “gets out” — the cash that is left.
That Amcu won’t strike at this mine, despite pleas from workers on the platinum belt for gold miners to express solidarity, suggests that the approach is different.
The mine was unbundled from Gold Fields, which thought it was reaching the end of its life. That and a series of strikes seemed to have brought into question its viability.
Its new owners, Sibanye Gold, have extended its life by radically cutting the cost of retrieving gold.
Sibanye’s managers say they have sought to address worker demands for better conditions of employment by emphasising safety, building formal housing and paying bonuses to those who meet production and safety targets.
For now, there is an uneasy peace on the gold mines while the platinum strike drags on.