Hundreds of miners were trapped for months – until two men set out to extract them

Hundreds of reactors were trapped underground without food and water in Stilafontine, South Africa. Two men living nearby volunteered to go down to the scene, to which the police, government officials or professional rescuers were unwilling to arrive.

This week, in their first decline into the shaft, Mandela Charles and Maccandel McVay, dressed in white hats, headlights and T-shirts, from a red cage that pulled out on a cable on the ground, about 1,300 meters above them. Their headlights had an illuminated sea face of men who crowded at the bottom, cried and begged to rescue them from the darkness of the abandoned gold mine Buffalo fountain. The headlights of the miners were honored or months earlier.

The volunteers dropped and rose more than 30 times underground during the next three days, raising 246 digging and remains of 78 more. The cage, designed to contain six people densely, picked up to 13 men into the surface in some of the uploads.

“I can’t explain the smell down there,” said Charles, 38, Leel Street Journal, at the entrance to the minefontine mine, about 160 miles southwest of Johannesburg. “They told us they ate human meat and cockroaches. They lost hope.”

The rescue mission, which ended on Thursday, after no further survivors were found, led to the end of a month -old staged, between miners who excavated illegally in search of gold, and a government that was determined to force them to rise to the surface. The miners have been trapped down since the police severed their food and water supply in August. A legal application filed by the Human Rights Organization to accelerate the rescue, included an affidavit of a miner who said, among other things, that some had to consume human meat to stay alive.

After human rights organizations opened a series of legal moves against the siege, the government finally initiated the rescue operation. However, official officials have refused to allow other police or government workers to enter the mine, for fear of safety in underground in a grounds that may be chaotic, and often fatal. Even in regular times, reports of a shotgun between competing leaders at a depth of more than a mile underground.

Then Charles and Maskawi were shot for help. Members of Noah’s character in the town of Tama, a few miles from the mine. A unemployed Maccabi and Charles, like the men he saved, worked as “Zama Zama”, the local term for men who excavated gold in the shafts that were closed by the companies that managed them. Interpretation of the phrase in the Zulu language is to “take a risk”.

Charles, who attended school until the 11th grade, said he left the last time underground in October, from another abandoned gold addict. Food, beverages and headlights, sales that bring their wares to mine.

“Thanks to this I managed to go down – I just thought about these guys,” said Charles, the father of four. “We didn’t care about the danger. We wanted to save these guys.”

“I took the bodies with my own hands and put them in the cage”

Officials thought it would be wise to send two locals from the nearby town, because they have a higher chance of communicating with the weak and desperate excavations than those involved in a siege that led to their difficult circumstances.

Members of the community, including McCarthy, were concerned that the rescue team approved by the government, which remains above the ground, will leave if there is no one to volunteer to dangle down in the cage to collect the miners, life and dead. Officials were concerned about the ability of the weakened men to enter, open and close the cage safely.

“I took the bodies with my own hands and put them in the cage,” said McGoui, 36, also the father of four. “Our government has scared them.”

Charles said it was difficult to ensure that he and Maccabi would continue to bring them to them, until everyone was put up safely to the surface.

“It was hard to decide” who to raise before, Charles said. Each download and upload took together 45 minutes. They tried to give priority to the weak, the patients and the dead, for fear that the ocean would get worse. They brought with them bread, fries and water, to ease the last tormented hours underground.

For about five months, the informal workers were trapped underground when the police tried to “smuggle them out by smoke,” as the words of Kumimozo Nahshibani, singing in the South African government. The operation was part of the police program “close the hole” of the fight against an illegal mining, which reached a crisis in South Africa.

A 42% jolving unemployment rate in South Africa led to high levels of chronic poverty, and did not leave many men with choice, but to drop into gold pastes that were closed by some of the world’s largest mining companies to feed their families. The Zama-Zama people are often the lowest level workers for large crime gangs, which eventually sell the gold abroad.

Between August and January, more than 1,500 reactors of their voluntarily expressed Buffalo fountain. Others died in an attempt to climb out of the mine, while some became too weak to try, after barricades under the ground for months to avoid detention.

The government is behind its actions

Survivors who have been removed from the Monday and Wednesday’s mine were charged with retreating and other crimes, and they were arrested or taken for medical treatment. Although they were attacked because of their difficult methods, government officials maintained their firm position against the miners.

“There’s nothing we would do differently,” said General Patrick Asanang, filling a Police Commissioner of the Northwest District, where it is located Buffalo fountainAt a press conference on Thursday. He compared the calls to give humanitarian aid to the request from the police to send food and water to the barricade in a bank. Sending a feed to the miners will be “crime and criminal assistance,” he said.

The miners who were rescued fromBuffalo fountain They are just a handful of tens of thousands of Zama-Zama people in South Africa, most of them immigrants who came from neighboring countries, hoping for a better life. But with little jobs, many, in the end, find illegally digging gold, under cheated conditions.

South Africa has more than 6,000 abandoned mines – those left in the country that, for decades,, the world’s leading gold production. From South Africa’s famous gold mining sector, almost half of the golden and jewelery ever made.

The country’s mines, which are rapidly aged, are also the deepest in the world, thanks to decades of cheap black work exploited during apartheid, the white minority’s government method, which ended in 1994. This made the continued activity in many mines and danger, leading to the closure of some.

Police and human rights organizations said Charles and Maskuy, heroes in their local community, where many of their miners lived with their families, would receive access to counseling after their terrible rescue mission.

“It was traumatic to see these people,” McGuer said. “My heart is broken.”

The hard experience also made Charles to think twice about back to the ground to look for gold, despite the lack of jobs in Stilpontine. He hopes that the government will prepare the work of the Zama-Zama people, and will allow digges to work safer in closed corporations.

“I’m not sure I’ll come back down,” Charles said. “Next time. It may be me.”