Five miners remained trapped deep underground at a diamond mine in Kimberley, South Africa, after a mudslide flooded the shaft where they were working, according to the mine operator and organized labour. Rescue teams were removing water and attempting to reach the workers as officials sought evidence that they were alive.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions said the miners had been underground since the early hours of Tuesday. The labour federation, whose members include the country's principal mineworkers union, said the group was believed to be about 800 metres below the surface. No confirmed deaths were reported in the supplied account, despite the discovery note describing the workers as presumed dead.
Ekapa Mining General Manager Howard Marsden outlined a two-part rescue effort in comments to national broadcaster SABC. One team was pumping water from the affected shaft, while another was drilling toward the area where the five miners were thought to be located. The borehole was intended to create a possible line of communication or provide some other indication of life.
The operation faced the basic obstacle created by the mudslide: water had entered an underground working area and separated the miners from rescuers. The account did not provide a timetable for reaching them, identify the workers or state whether rescuers had made contact. It also did not specify what triggered the slide. Those unknowns limited the available assessment of both their condition and the cause of the incident.
Kimberley, in South Africa's Northern Cape province, is closely associated with the diamond industry. Discoveries in the area during the late 19th century helped turn it into a historic centre of global diamond mining. Ekapa Mining operates the site where the workers were trapped.
The emergency occurred against a long-running national focus on safety in an industry that extracts diamonds, gold and platinum. The Minerals Council of South Africa said in its annual safety report that 41 mineworkers died in workplace accidents during the previous year. It described that figure as a record low, substantially below the hundreds of annual deaths recorded in the 1990s and early 2000s.
That broader improvement did not resolve the immediate uncertainty underground in Kimberley. The rescue depended on reducing the water level and drilling accurately toward the workers' believed position. With no verified contact reported by February 19, statements about the miners' fate would have gone beyond the evidence available. The confirmed position was that five people were trapped and that teams were pursuing simultaneous drainage and drilling operations.
