2009 Harmony Gold mine deaths

The 2009 Harmony Gold mine deaths occurred in late May and early June 2009 in Free State province, South Africa. At least 82 miners, many from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, died from inhalation of poisonous gasses created by a May 18 fire in the mineshaft.^[1][2]

Critically, the ranks of unemployed, independent and redundant miners are unofficially tolerated within unsecured, less-profitable mines. Consequently, in reports from Africa the dead are being officially defined as "illegal miners" — or "trespassers" — onto the mineral-claims of the larger corporate mining operators and market consortiums which traditionally depend on government-supported mineral-extraction concessions and export rights granted in areas such as Free State. A former police officer with 12 years' experience in cases of "illegal mining" said he feared that hundreds more bodies of "illegals" could still be underground in mines in the city of Welkom, according to a report in the leading Afrikaans daily, Beeld. He estimated that about 3,000 illegal miners work underground in the mines in Welkom alone.^[3]

The affected mine (the Eland shaft^[4]) is owned by Harmony Gold.^[5][6] Africa's third-largest gold producer and the fifth-largest in the world, Harmony is especially exposed to trespassers because the company followed a strategy of buying up old, abandoned or marginally productive mines (alongside controversial, environmentally expensive extraction techniques), which fell into disuse when gold prices were lower.^[7]