Their faces creased with anxiety, some weeping openly, scores of miners looked on Friday as rescue workers pulled the badly crushed remains of dozens of their colleagues from the bottom of a 1.5-mile-deep mine shaft where they died Wednesday night in one of this country's worst mine disasters.
Pressing close together near the cordoned-off entrance to their pit, the idled gold-mine workers of Shaft 5 groaned each time recovery teams, their members dressed in yellow slickers and face masks, carried off the tightly blanketed remains of the crushed victims on aluminum stretchers.More than 100 workers of the Vaal Reefs mine, 112 miles southwest of Johannesburg, were believed to have been killed when an electric train inexplicably plunged into Shaft 2.
By late Friday afternoon, 74 bodies had been recovered, leaving at least 30 people unaccounted for.
"My spirit was just starting to recover," said Mothabiza Tsomodi, 32, a barrel-chested supervisor from Lesotho, whose best friend, also a supervisor, is believed to have been killed in the accident.
"If I start talking about how I feel now, I'll soon be finished."
Officials said that most of the mine employees are migrant laborers from neighboring countries, including Mozambique, Swaziland, and Botswana, who live in sparely furnished hostels near the mine.
With the recovery of bodies still incomplete, no official list or definitive tally of victims has yet been made. Many workers said, however, that even once a list was established, notification of next of kin would be difficult with the victims' families dispersed throughout the region.
"The management has told us they are going to organize transportation for us back home to notify people," said Samuel Poopa, 55, a miner from Lesotho. "They haven't asked us how we have managed and, frankly, it is very hard to explain."