Being on a mine

29th March 2013

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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Ispent my youth on mines – in particular, on gold mines – and I have more or less seen mining operations of one kind or another every year for the last 30 years. Mines in Africa, that is.

I have seen some British coal mines – well, they call them mines, but they are more like small home-grown operations, compared with an African mine. For many of them, the mining is unique – in Carletonville, the gold mines go after the Ventersdorp Contact reef or the Carbon Leader at depths of up to 3 000 m below ground (oh, if you are a mining geologist and want to correct me, feel free).

Mining is by stoping or cutting sloping galleries into the reef, sloping upwards. Platinum mining is much the same, but at shallower depths. Coal mining is either above ground or below ground. If it takes place above ground, they use huge excavators (some have buckets which can hold up to 30 Mazda 4 × 4 bakkies or 7 Series BMWs and tip them into a hole for ever and ever, one time).

The excavators run on electricity and a power line is regularly moved to ‘plug in’ the excavator. Diamond mines like Finsch and Orapa, in Botswana, have huge openpits. When I last visited Finsch (is it closed now?) I saw hawks circling in the pit below me and the trucks, each 10 m from wheel track to cab top, minute toys on the haulage below. At Richards Bay Minerals, they mine the beach dunes for iron, titanium oxides and various obscure minerals. There are many others: copper mines ( in Zambia, the biggest in Africa and spread over 100 km ), tin mines, wolfram mines . . .

While mining methods are varied, most mines have a few things in common: the health and safety departments, the mine security and the catering depart- ments. When you arrive to work on any mine, the first thing you do is the safety induction. This is important, since it tells you what to do and what not to do and what you have to wear and what you are not allowed to wear. The induction training has to be pitched at a certain level, which puts the message across and which is simple to remember. It cannot be too simple but it also cannot be too complex.

This normally means that the average induction is confusing to those with a basic education and boring to those who have tertiary education. You report for safety induction training at the training centre. If you are an experienced attendee of safety inductions (I did my first one at the West Driefontein gold mine in 1973) you will be wearing full safety overalls, safety boots (steel toe cap) and you will have safety glasses, gloves and disposable ear plugs.

Arriving in shorts and T-shirt reading ‘Die Capitalist Pigs’ on the front and ‘No Greed, Just Need for Weed’ on the back and equipped with face piercings and Ray Ban ‘Aviator’ sunglasses more or less guarantees that you will be sentenced to five hours of bum-numbing lectures.

Assuming you have played it safe clothingwise (ha! ha!) and are wearing the right stuff, you will be sat in front of a computer, which will present you with a Powerpoint presentation of about 300 slides, all dealing with some aspect of safety. When you get through this, you will have to answer a questionnaire. Get one answer wrong and you have to do it all again.

Some of the slides are very funny. An example: “Transporting passengers in open trucks is strictly prohibited.” Right. Not just ‘prohibited’, but strictly so. Then “Only drink portable water.” The stuff that can be carried, not the stuff which is immobile. Further, “Don’t write a cheque your bank can’t cash.” Well, valid once but nobody cashes cheques in Africa any more, thanks to govern- ment corruption. “Don’t use your hard hat to collect water or dig holes”. Okay, point taken, but how far do you go? “Don’t cook in your hard hat” and “Don’t bite chunks out of your hard hat?”

Ahhh, mine safety induction –if you have not gone through this African experience, do look out for it.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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