Workers at a Sibanye-Stillwater gold mine in Randfontein were trapped for some time before being freed earlier this week after an electricity supply interruption caused by power lines that fell due to the integrity of the pylons along these lines being compromised by theft and vandalism.
In a statement on Wednesday, Eskom said it had dispatched a team of technicians to promptly restore supply to the gold mine where workers were unable to resurface. It did not say for how long the miners were stuck underground.
“The miners, who were trapped in the mine after the collapse of power lines, were safely evacuated when supply was restored on Monday, 20 February 2023,” the utility said.
“Production in the gold extracting mine came to a grinding halt while Eskom worked to restore supply at significantly high costs.”
Eskom said lines at Cooke shaft one as well as the Kagiso and Panvlakte Cooke shafts fell during a storm. Pylons are used to support electrical cables that transmit high-voltage electricity from where it is generated, such as a power station or wind farm, through the energy system to homes and businesses.
Eskom said the pylon structures were weakened by the theft of the tower members and the unstable ground caused by digging around the foundation.
“We recently reported that vandalism and theft have extended to include pylons whose tower members are often stolen by unscrupulous criminal elements, resulting in the steel structures collapsing. It is disturbing that this incident happens a week after we raised a concern about incidents of theft and vandalism of pylons”, maintenance and operations senior manager in Gauteng Mashangu Xivambu said in a statement.
The incident is the latest example of how the poor functioning of the country’s state-owned enterprises, particularly Eskom and ports and rail company Transnet, have negatively impacted the mining sector.
The latest data from Statistics South Africa showed that mining production decreased for the 11th consecutive month in December — on a year-on-year basis — as a result of load-shedding.
At the 29th annual Investing in African Mining Indaba earlier this month, Mineral
Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said power supply disruptions in 2022 had led to a decline in mineral production across all commodities.
Minerals Council South Africa chief economist Henk Langenhoven told the same conference that “the constraints around transport, logistics and border posts remain, and they are increasingly hampering mineral export volumes”.
Minerals Council chief executive Roger Baxter said Transnet’s logistics constraints had cost the industry R51 billion in exports. The costs of other structural constraints, such as those the industry has endured as a result of the ongoing energy crisis, were more difficult to tally, Baxter added.