Authorities said all the 1,000 miners trapped underground at Sibanye-Stillwater’s Beatrix gold mine in South Africa have been brought to the surface, local eNCA reported on Friday.
The miners were stuck underground on Thursday after a storm knocked out power.
Spokesman James Wellsted said the miners were safe and receiving food and water. Power was being restored to the mine but there was not yet enough to bring the miners to the surface.
NAN reports that the South Africa’s Chamber of Mines said the 2017 death toll in South Africa’s mines surpassed the 2016 figure, ending nine straight years of falling fatalities in the world’s deepest mines and raising red flags for the industry, government and labour groups.
The chamber said the trend reversal is likely to reignite investor concern over mine safety and could prompt regulators to step up shaft inspections, which often result in costly production stoppages.
The chamber said there had been several fatalities in recent weeks because of seismic activity.
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Anglo American Platinum CEO Chris Griffith, who heads the chamber’s CEO Zero Harm Forum, said the industry, government and labor needs to “accelerate initiatives that could improve this unacceptable performance”.
Fidel Hadebe, spokesman for the department of mineral resources, said “the department will certainly be stepping up efforts around this issue”, including closing operations for non-compliance with safety regulations.
Paul Mardon, head of health and safety at the Solidarity trade union, said there were concerns that production pressures were compromising safety as workers worried about their jobs in a difficult economic climate.
He also said there was a worrying trend in the size and frequency of what are called “fall of ground” incidents, which involve tunnel roofs or walls crumbling onto workers. This could point to geological or other structural issues.
With an unforgiving geology, South Africa is home to the world’s deepest mines.
South African mining companies include Harmony Gold, Gold Fields, Impala Platinum and AngloGold Ashanti among others. AngloGold Ashanti operates the world’s deepest mine, the Mponeng gold mine, which extends 4km (2-1/2 miles) below ground.
In 1993, the year before Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, 615 miners died in the pits.
By 2009 the number had dropped to 167 and kept falling, reaching a record low of 73 in 2016, according to Chamber of Mines data.
