For those who grumble about their daily commute, imagine this ride to work: clamber into an elevator cage and plummet 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) into the earth, so fast that ears pop from the changing air pressure. Then board a small railroad car that creaks and grinds the same distance to the outer reaches of a South African gold mine.
It gets humid down below. Sweat flows. For the unaccustomed, the din of drills and other machinery is disorienting. Travelers are weighed down by boots and a jumpsuit, a helmet with a mounted flashlight and a “self-rescuer,” a metal canister with a breathing tube and an oxygen supply in case something goes wrong.
Miners have a chain of command, but the extreme conditions are a kind of leveler.
“We’re all equal underground,” Gerard Pienaar, senior operations manager at South Deep mine, said on a recent tour of the flagship operation of Gold Fields Limited that provided a look at some of the conditions in South Africa’s mining industry that drives the continent’s biggest economy.
South Deep miners work 12-hour shifts — four days on, four days off. Forces of man and nature seem to be locked in battle in this extreme environment, where safety is a constant concern, and everyone depends on everyone else to stick to precautions.
South Africa has rich reserves of gold, platinum and other minerals but a sharp drop in the price of gold and labor unrest are challenging the mining industry. A strike over compensation in the platinum sector is into its third month. In 2012, police shot and killed several dozen protesters during labor unrest at a Lonmin platinum mine.
South African miners have traditionally used hand-held rock drills in tough and sometimes dangerous conditions. But that has changed at South Deep, located 45 kilometers (28 miles) southwest of Johannesburg where the company is based.
Gold Fields has spent $4 billion on the mine and the new mechanized operations make for improved conditions and less exposure to labor protests. Workers here typically earn three to four times more than counterparts at gold mines that are not mechanized, according to Gold Fields.
On the surface, employees learn how to maneuver machines on a high-tech simulator. Below, large vehicles traverse well-lit chambers. A state-of-the-art workshop that is the size of two football fields is being built. Gold Fields, which also has operations in Peru, Ghana and Australia, brought in Australian experts to build up workers’ skills.
Gold Fields has previously pushed back output goals at South Deep, partly because of the complex challenges of using machines underground, but it predicts full production by the end of 2017. The mine operates round the clock with about 5,000 employees.
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