More than 200 miners were trapped for a second day at a gold mine in South Africa as rescue efforts were in full swing on Friday.
The miners were trapped after what the company called a “shaft incident” at the Kloof gold mine, one of its deepest, according to Sibanye-Stillwater, which was reported on Thursday.
As a result of efforts made to get them out, it claimed that all the workers were safe and gathered at an assembly point where they had been given food.
Employees were instructed to remain at the sub-shaft station until it was safe to approach the surface, the company said.
Not immediately known how many workers were trapped overall. While a company spokesperson claimed 289 miners were in the shaft, 260 people were reported by news outlets as trapped.
The Kloof mine workers’ representatives, the National Union of Mineworkers, claimed they had been stranded for more than 24 hours as Sibanye-Stillwater continued to push back its estimated time to retrieve them.
According to NUM spokesman Livhuwani Mammburu, “we are very concerned because the mine did not even make this incident public.”
Source: Aljazeera
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