I’m A Millionaire

After some time away from the keyboard, the Urbancrows blog is (hopefully) back and planning to post a little more regularly than I have for the last year or so. With PDAC come and gone earlier this month, I’d hoped have some interesting blog-fodder fresh from the fetid floor of the Metro Convention Centre to impart. I may still post a few thoughts but they’re a little stale by now.

Anyways, writer’s block aside, last Fall I celebrated two 40th anniversaries. Joy.

I’m Old

Forty years is a long bloody time in any one’s diary. Aside from bringing on a profound sense of weld-schmertz at the rapid passing of my allotted time on this fair globe (I’m still a 16-year-old in my head) the 2 milestones sparked a lot of memories that were duly processed over a couple of pints in a fine old London pub.

In October, I caught the Southwest Rail 12.15pm train through south London and on down to the naval town of Portsmouth, back to Portsmouth University (then a polytechnic) where I completed my undergraduate studies in 1984. A couple of dozen of us from the 1984 grad year gathered in the Still and West* pub in Pompey’s storied old town to eat sausage rolls, down pints and reminisce about how wonderful it was back in the summer of 1984 to be a broke, unemployed, new-born geologist collecting 35 quid a week dole money from the government.

*The Still, as it’s known, is the only pub in the world to have collided with a battleship. True story.

We’re Geogolists

Some of us stayed the course, making a career of practising earth science in the oil or mining businesses. Some became teachers or joined the police force. One former classmate applied his rock expertise to archeology, tracking down the sources of building stones and helping to identify ancient ceramics. Me? Well, I went down a mine for 3 years and have spent the last 4 decades neck deep in the mining and exploration business working on precious metals, iron ore, phosphate rock and lately a silver-copper-manganese project in Peru.

Don’t Let Your Kids Be Miners

The other anniversary was altogether more sobering. Shortly after I arrived in South Africa in November 1984 to become a mine geologist, I was assigned to Vaal Reefs mine, close to the town of Klerksdorp in the Transvaal. During my first month on the mine, Vaal Reefs reached a rare milestone that was never to be repeated in my 3 years there. To celebrate the event company gave us all souvenir beer mugs which I still have.

What had we achieved? The lofty target of one million fatality free shifts. Not accident free, but fatality free, and it’s worth repeating that in my 3 years on Vaal Reefs, we only did that once. Although I’d only been at Vaal Reefs for a couple of weeks, I should’ve twigged when I read the dedication on the mug that things there weren’t all that they seemed. But at 21, I didn’t really pay much attention. I was too excited to finally have some money in my pocket with the promise of regular travel to exotic southern African places.

It Was A Very Bigly Mine

The mine had 9 shafts with a 10th under development. It was a big operation, and with a work force numbering roughly 45,000 people it took “only” 30-35 days -roughly a month- without a death to hit the million-shift mark. But the mine averaged about 45 fatalities per year -1 per thousand people per year or almost 1 a week- over my 3-year tenure so I never got a matching set of mugs.

The official South African government statistics claim the fatality rate at the time was 1.15 per thousand employees which means Vaal Reefs was marginally below average for the country. For comparison, the US industry reported 0.6 per thousand that year, or about half the South African rate. Interestingly, the Canadian government statistics for the same time period recorded a rate of about 1 per 1,500 full time equivalent employees which surprised me somewhat because the narrative at the time was how much more dangerous the South African mines were compared to other countries. The Canadian rate has steadily declined to 1 per 10,000 in 2022, testimony to the improvements in mine safety over the last 40 years. I’m betting that the South African stats are once again climbing rapidly, or they would be if the unreported deaths of illegal miners -scavenging the deep mines for left over gold ore and who number in the tens of thousands- were included.

Close To Home

The grim statistics from 1984 don’t tell the whole story though. I was directly impacted by the carnage. My underground assistant, Kilibone, died on the mine but he was murdered in a bar in the mine hostel, so his death wasn’t included in the official statistics. Kilibone was an effortlessly cool, funny man who could go into the hottest, filthiest working faces and come out spotless. I’d be drenched in sweat, covered in mud and dust and grease and he’d be happily strolling along beside me in bright white coveralls without a spot of dirt. I also lost an underground driller once to a bizarre accident involving a piece of drill core that had become lodged at the top of a long diamond drill hole.

Yeah No. Time to Leave.

I worked on Vaal Reefs No. 2 shaft, one of the oldest and most profitable shafts on the mine. It was originally sunk in the 1950s and we were churning out 250,000 ounces per year during my spell as senior geologist there. It was a bloody rabbit warren underground and there were areas of 2 Shaft that I pretty much avoided for 2 years; old workings that had been hit by so many seismic events that collapses were common. It wasn’t so much solid rock in the old tunnels as rubble held together with rock bolts and meshing, so with hindsight it was a wonder that we didn’t lose more men to rock falls. The shaft suffered 2 horrible lift accidents. The first in 1980, which I heard about when I first arrived, resulted in 31 fatalities when a descending lift got stuck in the shaft. The lift cable continued to pay out piling up on the roof of the cage which suddenly broke free under the weight and fell 7,000ft. The second, in 1995, killed 104 miners when an underground locomotive fell into the mine shaft as a lift was ascending.

In the end I quit Vaal Reefs in late 1987. I’d had enough of Apartheid South Africa and close calls underground and had booked a place at the University of Alberta to throw myself into a master’s degree project up north in Yukon, a refreshing non-violent change to the troglodytic life of a mine geologist.