Johan Friedrich fecit-my stuff

POSTED ON MARCH 29, 2021 BY JFRIEDRICH

Everyone knows that mining is dangerous. This is what it’s like when you’re three thousand feet underground and things go wrong in a really big way. I spent most of 1977 and 1978 underground at Randfontein Estates Gold Mine and Rustenburg Platinum’s Amandelbult mine near Thabazimbi.

One day, part of the stope I was working in at Randfontein ‘broke its back’ and collapsed. The shockwave of air displaced by the huge fall of rock was so powerful that workers in other parts of the mine thought there had been an explosives accident. Three of our workers were missing for a short time and we feared the worst, but thankfully they escaped. In the next twenty four hours the whole hanging wall came down in the stope and it was abandoned. 

About a week later I went back there to see what could be salvaged; where our equipment store had been, the workplace two metres high, it had closed almost completely. I have researched the phenomenon of ‘backbreak’ and discovered that it was a known problem in the UE1A reef horizon at Cooke I Section of REGM, where it caused a change in the late 1970s from cement filled grout support packs to the use of crush pillars left in the reef to stabilise the hanging wall.

Apart from the obvious danger to miners when the hanging wall falls on or near them, there was the risk of flooding. In 1968 the hanging failed in a stope at West Driefontein; water from the dolomite in the country rock poured into the mine and flooded it, fortunately without loss of life. The same dolomite overlies the UE1A reef. There were massive steel doors in the haulages at Cooke 1 in case of a similar inundation and, said the cynical, it would be your bad luck if you were on the wrong side of them when the time came. The most likely cause of such a flood would have been a large fall of ground, as at West Drie.

Even after four decades I’m disappointed to think that the management had ample warning that something was about to go wrong that morning, but still left us in there until it did. Anyway, I guess the main thing was that nobody died.

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In the crosscut near our stope, a timber gang was sending gum poles, timber mats and bundles of sawn wooden wedges down to the stope, looping each item with nylon twine onto the moving steel cable that would drag it to its destination. The leading hand sat on a stack of the mats, counting o! each item and writing a tally in a battered notebook with a stub of pencil. If he heard the almost constant succession of noises in the rock above us, he gave no sign of it.

I tapped him on the shoulder and he looked up. His lamp shone in my face and he smiled in apology and hung it around his neck. I pointed at the hanging wall. “It speaks, today?”

“Like that, the whole morning.” He pointed to the traveling way that traversed the old section of our stope. “Today, the hanging wall,down there in the old part, will fall.” He made a chopping motion with his hand and his index finger slapped against the others with a loud crack.

I looked at him. “You think so?” He nodded emphatically.

In the old workings, my boots scuffed the rock dust that covered the footwall. Occasionally, a gum pole dragged by the cable alongside the traveling way thumped against an obstacle on its journey to our timber store. Now, away from the noise of activity in the crosscut, I could really hear the noises in the hanging wall. I stopped for half a minute and listened to the creaks and cracks coming from it. I was new to mining, but it seemed to portend some big, dangerous event. It worried me, but I was also curious to see what would happen.

At the muster point in our stope, Kobus was reading his newspaper and drinking coffee from the cup of his thermos flask. “Good morning, Jan. Will you take some coffee?”

“Morning, Kobus. No thanks.” On the first morning I’d accepted and noticed that when he ate his sandwiches he’d had no coffee to drink with them. Since then I’d declined, but he still offered me some every morning. We made small talk about rugby and mine gossip. I’d already learned it was bad form to show apprehension, let alone outright fear at any of the hazards that might kill or cripple us, and feigned a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “The hanging wall’ s a bit noisy today?”

Kobus smiled. “You noticed? Yes, I think part of that madala side will come down soon. I hope it’ s after blasting time.” He shook his head. “It’ s because we stripping out along that fault. I don’t like it.”

My rational inner self protested, ‘Well, why are we still in here?’ but I said nothing. Kobus drank the last of his coffee. “Come, we’ll go down to number one face, there’s something you got to see. It’s amazing, man.”

I went with him to the gully that ran down the stope’ s centre. Along it, a scraper bucket was dragging rock from the previous day’ s blast to the ore pass. Kobus yanked at the cable attached to the hooter next to the winch a hundred metres away at the bottom of the gully and the winch cables went slack as the driver disengaged the clutch.

We clambered across and Kobus pulled the cable on the other side. The cables went taut and slapped against the hanging wall as the scraper started up again. We made our way through a forest of support packs to the old part of the workings, at the right of our working faces. Away from the commotion of the scraper and the rock drills on the other side of the stope it was quiet and now I could hear the hanging wall again, much louder than before.

Kobus spoke. “We getting near now. Wait till you see this, I’ve never seen anything like it, man.”

We scrambled down a steep section of the foot wall that marked the line of the fault that was reducing the length of the right hand face with every blast we made. When it levelled out, he stopped and squatted. I did the same. He directed his lamp at the rock above us. On the other side of the fault line the beam picked out a long, ragged fissure, about parallel to the fault. In the part nearest us it was easily twenty five centimetres wide. I could not estimate its length, but it extended beyond the limit of the lamp’ s beam. Now and then pieces of rock fell out of it.

Kobus moved his lamplight back and forth along the thing. “What do you think?”

I chose my words carefully. “Are they going to leave us working here with this so near to us?”

Kobus’ lamp lit his lean face from beneath. He shrugged. “There’s still a lot of reef left in this place. They not going to leave it here if we can get it out.”

I looked at him. “But what will happen if this all comes down in here? Will it fall where we’re working now?”

“Man, I really don’t know. It should come down on the other side of the fault, but what do I know? I’m just a miner with a blasting ticket. OK, Mr Learner Official, now go down and mark off faces two and three and then I want you to go and check that new machine boy on number one. Make sure he’ s staying under those lines. I’ll see you at the box later, alright?”

Around midday Kobus came and found me.“The shift boss came. He’s going to fix up another timber line to bring our timber up from 101 level. They going to organise our water and air from down there too. And that’s it; we keep going.”

There was nothing more to be said and I didn’t want a reputation for a lack of moral fibre. We headed back towards the faces and the faint roar of the rock drills. That whole morning, we stayed where were, getting ready to blast our faces, just like any other day.

“What do you think?”

He laughed and jabbed a #nger towards the hanging. “I don’t know, man. I’ve never seen anything like that crack. I’m no geologist, but something up there has come loose. Now, it wants to come down and those grout packs can’t hold it up. But I’m just the contractor. I do what the shift boss tells me to do. He does what the mine captain tells him to do, and we all do what the manager tells us to do. That’s how mining works, my friend. If we wanted safe jobs, we would be working in an office.

Ten minutes later I was in front of the number two face, markingit for the machine crews. I had a paintbrush attached to a length of wooden charging stick and a can of red paint that was about a third thinners, so it would dry quickly. In a confined space the fumes could get you really high. The lines that I painted on the face showed where the holes had to be drilled; others on the hanging wall were to align the rock drill at the correct angle for the holes to break the rock cleanly.

I felt it in my ears just before it hit us; a monstrous compression ahead of the shockwave of air displaced from the old workings as a piece of rock that would have covered most of a rugby field fell down fifty or sixty metres from me. As it knocked me sideways off my feet, an elongated globule of paint snaked out of the tin and burst against the face, and then I hit the gum pole behind me.

I landed on my back, still conscious. My head rang from the blow and the pressure wave. My helmet had fallen off. I pulled on my lamp cord and my helmet clattered towards me with my lamp. I scrambled to my feet and jammed it back on my head. Moving looms of lamplight waxed and dimmed in the thick yellow dust that filled the stope as men ran and fell, colliding with support packs and with each other. Iheard hoarse shouts of terror and panic. Somewhere near me there was an impact and a grunt of pain.

I saw light near me in the haze of dust. On the footwall near me Imade out someone lying face down. As I squatted and shook him, he moaned and started to move.

“Are you alright, madoda?” My voice sounded faint. I pinched my nose and blew out against closed lips. My ears popped painfully and the sounds around me got louder.

The man got onto all fours and then into a crouch. In the light from my lamp his face was a mask of blood from a gash in his left temple. His eyes were dull and unfocused. I took my sweat cloth from my neck and rolled it into a bandage. I put the cloth against the wound and put his unyielding hand against it, then knotted it around his head. I found his lamp cable and pulled on it. It was still working but his helmet was gone. Only a couple of minutes had elapsed since the shockwave.

I stood and pulled him up with me. “Come, we must get out.” But as we headed towards the face, I was wondering what we would do if the travelling way down to 101 level was blocked and we were trapped in the stope.

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On the level below we gathered, dazed, subdued, coated with dust. By some miracle, no-one had been seriously hurt, but bright bloodstains showed on overalls in the moving beams of lamps. Someone had brought first aid kits and white field dressings and slings stood out in the gloom. The men sat on benches at a muster point in the haulage as Kobus called the roll, answering to their names and ticket numbers.

Even before he got to the end, we knew three were missing. They were from the timber gang and the men said they’d been working at the end of the timber line, near our equipment store.

Kobus turned to me. I knew what was coming. “We going back in Jan, you and me and Long One.” The tall Shangaan leading hand standing behind Kobus grunted when he heard his nickname.

We climbed back up the traveling way into the stope. There was still a lot of dust in the air, but most of it had settled. We passed the assembly point and went deeper into the working. We shone our lamps into the darkness on either side, shouting and whistling, looking and praying for light from another lamp or an answering call or sound, to show someone was alive in there. Every few metres we stopped and listened, but we heard only the hanging wall. It was coming down faster now, after the huge displacement of rock above us.

In a numb, fascinated horror I watched a grout pack disintegrating near me. The timbers had split and the great plug of cement mortar inside was fractured from top to bottom. Streams of grout fragments poured out through tears in the big nylon bag that had contained it while it hardened.

My skin crawled with fear. We went on until we came to our equipment store, formed by grout packs built against one another to form a rough oblong room, with a door. They were trembling as they started to fracture and break up. We went round the back of it to where we could see the stacks of gum poles, wedges and mats. Pieces of the hanging wall lay around, but there was no sign of the men.

Now, the noise from the hanging wall was continuous. We shouted again and listened, but we heard nothing. Further into the stope there was a loud thud as some huge piece of rock came down. I felt the shock through the soles of my feet.

Kobus looked towards the sound and then back at me. Sweat made tracks in the dust on his face and chest. “Have you two heard anything?”

Long One and I shook our heads.

Kobus’ face was haggard with anguish in the indirect light from our lamps. “OK, that’s it, no further. The proto team will be coming. It’s no good if we get stuck in here too. If they in there…, shit, it would take us an hour to find them. Let’s go.” He started back the way we’d come and we followed him. It took all of my remaining self control not to overtake him and break into a sprint.

We heard it before we got down to the haulage; laughter and happy voices. Our missing three were back with us; one with a broken arm, another some broken ribs. We pushed through the men to where they sat, smiling with relief. They’d dived into an old traveling way as the hanging wall fell down around them and found their way to another crosscut on 101 level. It was my first experience of unalloyed joy at the unexpected survival of another human being.