Hey Travis, I just read your post on the Kopapang Mine. for those of you don't know the Kopapang Mine is located in about 170KM south of Johannesburg on the Jersey Fault line, it is over 1.5 miles deep! The working conditions are terrible in 2002 seven people died because of carelessness of the mine officials. Anyway, back to your article I did some more digging and found that after being threatened to be shut down in 2002 because of the excessive amount of needless deaths they have greatly improved there safety measures and have over 1 million death free shifts. Although I would not enjoy working there The Kopapnag Mine is now safe, death free, and an asset to South Africa as a whole. So what do you think should they closed the mine or should they have kept it open?
P.S. In 2011 like Travis said they produced over 307,000 ounces of gold an equivalent to 41,626,130 million USD.
I think that's cool that a mine can produce so much gold. I'm glad that the mine is safe and there is no more useless deaths. I found out that in 2012 the workers held a strike because they were not happy and it prevented the night shift from taking place. That probably helped make the mines safer. I know that the mines produced mainly gold, but they also produced uranium which was 4% higher than usual in 2007. What kinds of products do you think would be normally produced in the mines?
ReplyDeleteThis Kopanang mines seem to sound as if they were a very dangerous place to work before. After doing some more digging, I found out that the Department of Mineral Resources (a.k.a DMR) are making laws more strict about the health, and safety standards of the workers which are causing some mines to close down. These sudden changes are putting more and more miners out of jobs without money. Even worse, the shares of gold from the mining industries are going down which is really bad for the economy since mining is a really big industry.
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