The hidden cost of South Africa’s mines

Decades after fuelling South Africa’s prosperity, abandoned gold mines are creating environmental and safety risks that can no longer be ignored. Picture: iStock Our natural environment, our planet – Gaia, if you’re an incense-burning woodland mystic – has its own way of proving that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. That’s why so much attention is being paid to climate change: the experts tell us that human influence has so changed some of earth’s basic weather drivers, that we’re going to be paying the price in increasingly extreme weather events, fromdroughtsto typhoons.

Closer to home, South Africa is facing a similar reality, but one which might come to pass sooner than the longer term predictions for global climate change. This country’s wealth was built mainly on minerals extracted from the ground beneath and specifically, gold. This symbol of wealth was mined and recovered at great effort, and expense, under some of the most difficult goldminingconditions in the world.

Not for nothing does this country hold world records for the greatest depth reached by mineshafts. What that mother lode – concentrated mainly around the Reef area of Gauteng – has cost in terms of extraction, is the replacement of stable sub-terranean rock formations with massive voids of nothing. These voids are filling with water or being further exploited byillegal zama zama miners, both of which pose dangers for ongoing underground stability.

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Unless the abandoned mines are rehabilitated and closed so no one can access them and unless zama zama excavation is stopped, there is a very real possibility of an earthquake, tremor or sinkhole destroying property… and lives. Gauteng residents will already have experienced tremors in their lifetime – and the worry is that these will get worse.

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