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Harmony Gold reported its 15th death in 18 months after another worker lost their life in a seismicity-related fall-of-ground incident.The grim spell for the company, which operates some of South Africa’s oldest and deepest gold mines, is a sombre reminder to CEO Beyers Nel of the need to improve the group’s safety record.The latest fall-of-ground fatality occurred at Harmony’s Moab Khotsong mine near Orkney on Friday morning, the group said on Monday. It did not provide further details about the incident.Fall-of-ground incidents, where ground or rock unexpectedly collapses, are one of the most common causes of death in the mining industry and a longstanding feature of South Africa’s deep, underground mines.Harmony’s particularly deep assets make it among the worst-performing miners in terms of safety. Moab Khotsong is more than 3km deep, one of the country’s deepest, while Harmony’s biggest asset, Mponeng, is the deepest mine in the world.While fall-of-ground incidents have steadily declined in recent decades, dropping from more than 300 in 1993 to a record low of six in 2022, they continue to pose a significant risk to Harmony and the industry at large. Last year, fall-of-ground-linked fatalities jumped by 25% year-on-year to 15.“The focus area for now is personal ownership. We’re trying to get our employees to genuinely own safety as individuals. A proxy is road safety. You can have a perfectly safe highway or car, but if the driver chooses to speed or break the rules, that’s when catastrophes happen.”— Harmony Gold CEO Beyers NelAgainst this backdrop, safety has long troubled Harmony’s shareholders, with the question of safety statistics consistently cropping up at annual general meetings.All this means Nel, who has put improving the company’s safety performance among his top priorities as CEO, has his work cut out.“If there’s one thing that keeps me awake at night, it’s the safety of mineworkers. That is our number one value as a company,” Nel told Business Day earlier this year.As a more than 20-year veteran of Harmony and the group’s former COO, Nel sees his operational expertise as a unique advantage in turning around Harmony’s safety stats.“I was basically the frontman of our [safety] strategy in the operations. As the CEO, I see my role as a continuation of that at the highest level in making sure we continue to improve safety,” he said.According to Nel, the group’s focus is on integrating more advanced technology, including data centres which run 24-hours a day, to provide crews with safety information in as close as possible to real time.Every morning at 3am, each mine crew receives a report on the state of the mine area they are working on, identifying where there may be potential safety risks. “Some of the tunnels we’re developing at Mponeng have massive support units, the best that money can buy. We continue to throw the kitchen sink at these things to make absolutely sure we can prevent these accidents.”Changing attitudes around safety is another key focus. Nel said the group had invested significantly in a “multi-pronged approach” of training employees and managers to take ownership of the safety culture at their working sites.“The focus area for now is personal ownership. We’re trying to get our employees to genuinely own safety as individuals. A proxy is road safety. You can have a perfectly safe highway or car, but if the driver chooses to speed or break the rules, that’s when catastrophes happen.”Business Day
