- The South African mineworkers' unions today announced
plans for countrywide strike to 'protest against the lack of safety in
mines', with a great many inexplicable, deadly underground fires, accidents
and shaft-collapses being reported in the SA mining industry over the past
few years.
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- http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_art
icle.aspx?Nav=ns&ArticleID=1518-25_2231405
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- However, many of the country's tens of thousands of mineworkers
are also causing these collapses of mineshafts themselves -- because of
their unquestionable support of some 1,000 illegal gold-mine 'pirates'
-- unskilled young men recruited by international crime syndicates. These
heavily-armed youngsters often spend months underground in some of the
world's deepest mineshafts, digging out tons of gold- and platinum-ore.
There activities have already caused several dangerous underground fires
which rages for days and caused many deaths. And at least 25 of these 'slave-pirate-miners'
were recently brought to the surface by police after they had suffocated
from methane-gas fumes.
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- SA Police estimates that at lest a thousand unpaid, heavily-armed
young men are now slaving away deep underground as illegal miner-pirates
in South Africa. These unskilled youths usually only get food and drink
brought to them from relatives above-ground, working deep underground for
months on end. They are armed with hand-grenades and AK-47s to defend themselves
from the small police task force which ventures below to try to flush them
out.
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- These youngsters hack away inside these dark, precarious
tunnels without any regard to safety. Some underground illegal smelters
have been found by police where they had used mercury to seperate the gold
from the ore before it smuggled to their slave-masters above ground. Many
of these youngsters mingle with 'legal' miners during daytime mining operations
too. Other groups hijack entire shafts and tunnels and defend them with
weapons.
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- The small police task-force which has been appointed
to flush out the underground slaves, have also discovered many mini smelters
in backyard shanties all over the townships around the country's mines.
These smelters also cause dangerous pollution of the underground acquifers
which the vast majority of the 46-million people living in semi-arid South
Africa must rely on for potable water. This dangerous chemical runoff is
simply being poured away into the gutters.
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- South African gold and platinum both contain high levels
of uranium and other lethal heavy metals.
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- Entire mining-communities around these SA mines are thus
involved in utterly destroying South Africa's once so well-maintained mines
- some have the deepest shafts in the world. Many shafts reportedly are
now becoming dangerously unstable after they have been hijacked by the
slave-pirates.
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- Read more here (with map of SA's massive, untapped platinum
deposits -
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- http://groups.msn.com/crimebustersofsouthafrica/piracy.msnw?action=get_
message&mview=0&ID_Message=4018&LastModified=4675650407467144117
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- National Geographic
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- SA's Deepest Gold Mine
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- November 6, 2007 - The Gold Fields Ltd. company is set
to break the mining depth record as it drills down 2.5 miles (4 kilometers)
at its Driefontein location, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) southwest of
Johannesburg, South Africa.
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- An estimated 8.5 million ounces (240 million grams) of
gold is thought to lie in the mine at such depths.
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- As gold prices reach near-record highs, South Africa's
mining companies are rushing to take up a new, more dangerous form of mining:
"ultra deep." But several accidents in South Africa-the world's
largest gold producer-in recent weeks have drawn attention to the safety
record of the mining industry, experts say. We would not generally oppose
the idea of ultra-deep mining if our people were safe," said Lesiba
Sheshoka, spokesperson for South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers.
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- "But we are opposing it on the basis that we have
already seen a significant rise of fatalities."
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- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/photogalleries/mining-pictures/
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