44 Killed in South Africa Gold Mine Fire

At least 170 gold miners were killed and 14 others were feared dead after a fire trapped them a mile underground Tuesday in a mine shaft filled with thick, noxious smoke.

Kobus Olivier, general manager of the Kinross Gold Mine, who gave the casualty figures, said early today, about 15 hours after the fire broke out, that there was little hope for the trapped miners unless they had found pockets of oxygen to sustain them.

The chief of the local civil defense unit, Kobus van Zyl, described the accident as “a very serious disaster” and said that his group had been asked to “handle a massive number of corpses.”

The fire, set off when a welder’s spark ignited a cylinder of oxygen, is the worst accident in South African mining since a 1960 cave-in buried 437 miners at the Coalbrook Colliery south of Johannesburg. It brought immediate charges from the National Union of Mineworkers that safety was being sacrificed for increased gold production.

Accident Rate Cited

“The accident rate in our mines is getting out of hand,” Cyril Ramaphosa, president of the all-black union, said as the death toll mounted. “These accidents where workers are killed through factors that can be avoided by management are totally unacceptable to us. . . . Black lives cannot be wasted just to get higher profits.”

All but five of the dead or missing miners are black, according to mine officials. Most are believed to be migrant workers, many coming from neighboring countries.

More than 2,000 miners were brought safely out of the rich Kinross mine, near the town of Evander, about 65 miles east-southeast of Johannesburg, in a daylong rescue effort, but 183 were hospitalized, half a dozen in serious condition, for smoke inhalation and other injuries.

The local South African Press Assn. quoted an unidentified witness, apparently a rescue worker who had been at the scene through the day, as saying that more than 100 bodies had been brought to the surface and that hundreds of others were still trapped underground.

“The mine management has totally clammed up about the accident,” Van Zyl, the local civil defense official, added. “They don’t want to speak to us; in fact, they don’t want to speak to anybody. All I can say is that there has been a very serious disaster. We have been asked by the Evander hospital to help with the care of patients sent there, and we have been asked to handle a massive number of corpses.”

The fire took eight hours to extinguish, and at one time more than 400 miners were trapped in the smoke-filled galleries between two of the mine’s shafts, according to mine officials. But 10 special six-man rescue teams found half of them alive and unconscious and brought them to the surface.

The thick, poisonous smoke came from burning plastic on electrical wiring and from plastic pipes, the mine officials said, and carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide filled adjacent areas of the mine. This delayed rescue teams for several hours while the smoke was pumped out of the two shafts, according to mine officials.

Harry Hill, a spokesman for the General Mining Union Corp., owner of the mine which employs more than 8,000 workers, said that most of the bodies brought out so far were found in or near the area where the fire began and that rescue teams will continue today to search adjacent tunnels and galleries for other miners.

“There is not much hope, but there is some, that we will find other survivors,” Hill said.

On Tuesday, the South African Chamber of Mines, an industry group, had reported that in the first half of 1986 the fatality rate for gold mine accidents dropped below one per 1,000 workers for the first time. The injury rate has been halved over the past decade, the chamber said, and so far this year had been reduced to 18.8 injuries per 1,000 workers.

The chamber said the improved safety record was achieved despite the increased difficulties of mining at greater depths and over larger areas underground.

According to the chamber, mining is more hazardous because of a continuously changing environment below ground, high pressure and heat and its very labor intensiveness.

MP, Los Angeles Times