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Harmony to lose 32,150 oz gold in mine closure
Allan Seccombe
Posted: Fri, 12 Oct 2007
[miningmx.com] -- HARMONY will lose 1,000 kg or 32,151 oz of gold from its closed Elandsrand mine, which will be resume operations on 19 November after being shut for a safety inspection and repairs to its shaft.
A broken pipe damaged the shaft last week, causing 3,200 workers to be trapped underground for up to 30 hours. The incident prompted President Thabo Mbeki to call for an audit of the country's roughly 700 mines to ensure they comply with safety regulations.
No one was hurt in the incident, but the government ordered the mine to be closed for an investigation. Harmony is making repairs to the damaged shaft too.
"Total days of production lost will therefore be approximately 48 days, resulting in an approximate loss of 1,000kg gold," acting CEO Graham Briggs said in a statement.
"It's possible to make some of that back, but I can't say at the moment how
much," he later told Miningmx.
The repairs to the shaft will be completed by 12 November and production will resume seven days later on the 19th.
About seven to 14 days of the 48-day downtime, will be spent restoring cooling at the workfaces and making sure work areas are safe after standing for so long, Briggs said.
"The repairs are quite extensive. We have all the details on that
now so that's why we put out the media release. There were a lot of guesstimates on what the lost production would be," he said. Estimates on lost production had been put at between 600kg to 700kg.
The repairs were most likely to be covered by insurance.
Harmony is spending R609m at the mine in a deepening project to be completed by 2010 to add an extra 18 years of life to the operation. Elandsrand, which has 6.9 million oz of proven reservces, will produce 445,000 oz/year.
Harmony has five growth projects underway that will lift the group's gold output to about 3.1 million oz by 2011.
A task team, comprising members of the Department of Minerals and Energy, independent consultants and members of the mine's workforce, is conducting a thorough investigation and analysis of the events that led to and resulted in the incident, Briggs said.
Workers not involved in fixing the shaft have been sent home on paid leave between 12 and 29
October.
"On return all employees will participate in refresher training to comply with legislation," he said.
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