Health & safety 8% Of all deadly
workplace incidents come from mining, despite only
employing 1% of the world’s workforce.
International Labour Organisation
ripped through their shaft. About 70t of debris hurtled towards them, smashing escape lifts and trapping the workers half a kilometre from safety. Even days after the disaster, rescuers weren’t even sure any miners were left alive. Finally, though, they made contact with a group of survivors. After another week of effort, 11 miners were finally evacuated alive. Around a dozen of their colleagues, though, were less lucky. A depressing story. But what’s probably more shocking is just how often it’s repeated. Similar mine collapses have recently struck Chile (2010), India (2013), Turkey (2014), Mexico (2018) and the US (2020), among many other places. And though not every accident ends in fatalities, the numbers are still bleak. According to the International Labour Organisation, mining accounts for 8% of all deadly workplace accidents, despite employing just 1% of the world’s workforce. Not that the situation is hopeless. With the support of a local gold mine, one South African NGO is developing new ways to extract underground miners quickly and securely when disaster strikes – with lessons the world over.
It’s all about speed
Drive south-west from Johannesburg and you’ll go by many standard scenes of South African life: poor suburbs, breezeblock townships and shrubland the colour of weak ale in the sun. But if you turn left off Randfontein Road, past the piles of landfill and the trucks rumbling in the other direction, you’ll finally reach something extraordinary. Known as the South Deep Mine, it contains the deepest single-drop shaft on the planet. Tumbling 3,000m below the earth’s surface, it takes lifts six minutes to reach the bottom. Workers complete the trip in cage lifts 9m in diameter, and when they arrive temperatures at the rockface can reach 50°C.
“It’s an insurance policy that’s well worth the investment in our view, and that we hope we’ll never need to use.”
Martin Preece
Not that the South Deep, operated by Gold Fields, is totally unique. Eight out of the ten deepest mines in the world are located in South Africa, something Mannas Fourie says has historically posed major challenges for mine operators and workers – especially when it comes to rescue equipment. “If you look at what we currently have in the industry, we have a rescue winder that could go down to 1,200m,” explains Fourie, CEO of MRS Training & Rescue, a South African NGO. “That limited our capabilities if something had happened below that depth.”
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Instinctively, this makes sense. After all, why have rescue equipment that can only go halfway down a shaft if something goes wrong? That’s especially true given the many dangers of life underground, from fires to fly-rocks to toxic fumes. More fundamentally, though, grasping Fourie’s point requires you to understand how important speed is to any extraction. With traditional equipment, rescuers have to lift miners several hundred metres, then drop them off on a platform, then repeat the same process once or even twice more. And because older winches can only carry a single miner at once – all at a leisurely 0.8m per second – you’re potentially looking at dozens of trips up and down a mine shaft. Things risk being even slower if, like many rescue winches, you first need to hook the system up to the mine’s power supply. “If you look at the critical time to rescue people,” says Fourie, “you haven’t got that time to waste.” As the famous ‘golden hour’ rule states, receiving treatment within 60 minutes of a traumatic injury increases the chance of surviving by over 80%. And though exact statistics are scarce, Fourie’s broader argument is mirrored by incidents at specific mines. For instance, after a 2006 collapse at Sago, in West Virginia’s rugged coal country, 13 workers were trapped. Rescuers finally reached the group 42 hours later – but it was too late for all but one of the miners, the rest of whom had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. In other words, it’s unsurprising that operators are always on the lookout for ways to get staff out quicker. “We never put a price on the safety of our people,” emphasises Martin Preece, executive vice-president at Gold Fields. “I think the priority is to get every one of our employees home safely every day.”
Prepared for the worst
In January 2021, the South Deep hosted a red-letter day in the world of mining. Supported by workers from Gold Fields, Fourie and his team at the MRS tested out a new kind of rescue winch, the climax of a project that had begun nearly a decade ago. Exploiting the twin shaft’s colossal depth, the MRS put a new kind of rescue winch to the test – and zipped the full 3,000m to the bottom of the mine in one swoop. “It allowed Mannas to take the equipment to its maximum capability,” explains Preece regarding the experiment’s location. “It’s an insurance policy that’s well worth the investment in our view, and that we hope we’ll never need to use.”
Of course, going the distance is a great start: no longer do rescuers have to stage extractions across several arduous legs. But the so-called mobile rescue winder improves on existing models in many other ways too. For one thing, there’s the speed. Capable of travelling at 1.5m per second, it goes at nearly double the clip of older equipment. Then there’s its
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
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