An elevator door malfunctioned, opened unexpectedly, released debris and triggered a safety inspection. If this happened in your office, maintenance would post an ‘Out of Order’ sign, check the equipment and direct you to the stairs. But this happened in a gold mine, and 260 workers were trapped 3 000m underground.

The incident occurred at Sibanye-Stillwater’s Kloof 7 gold mine in May 2025, and while no workers were at risk of injury at any point, it was a chilling reminder of the dangers of underground mining operations. The risks are heightened, and small mistakes or malfunctions quickly escalate into major, life-threatening crises.

Sibanye-Stillwater’s safety protocols kicked in, and calm heads prevailed – as one would  expect from a multinational mining company that had recently won six industry health and safety awards at the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy’s MineSafe2024 conference. Operations were suspended while the problem was solved. Rescue and medical teams were deployed immediately, and the workers were provided with food and water while they waited in place, rather than using emergency escape routes, which would have meant long walks through the mine workings.

‘Safety remains our core priority, and we will not resume operations until we are confident that all the necessary remedial actions have been implemented,’ said Neal Froneman, then Sibanye-Stillwater CEO. Within hours, all 260 workers had returned to the surface safely.

That the Sibanye-Stillwater incident made news headlines at all is a testament to SA’s improving mining safety standards. In 2024, the industry reported 42 fatalities. That’s ‘42 too many’, according to Japie Fullard, chair of the Minerals Council’s CEO Zero Harm Forum, but it represents a 24% reduction from 55 in 2023, along with a 16% reduction in injuries (down to 1 841 people).

Fullard, like many industry leaders, has shifted the focus to creating safe work spaces in SA’s mines. ‘The more we focus on preventing injuries, the more fatalities will come down,’ he says. ‘It is not about what we do after events but what we do before the time to make the workplace as safe and healthy as possible.’

Fullard says that while lagging indicators of safety performance are important, greater focus should be placed on leading indicators that provide ‘early-warnings’ to assist in incident prevention.

Merel van der Lei, CEO of communications software company Wyzetalk, agrees. ‘Instead of solely tracking fatalities and injuries (which are lagging indicators – telling us what has happened), the industry must identify and rigorously monitor leading indicators,’ she says. ‘These are proactive measures that predict future safety performance, such as the frequency of hazard reporting, active participation in safety discussions or the timely resolution of identified risks.’

In line with this approach, Impala Platinum has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve safety at its Rustenburg operations. ‘We’ve learnt recently that the use of AI can also assist us quite a lot in terms of removing human error in some of the safety systems, safety processes and systems that we are using,’ says Implats CEO Moses Motlhageng, adding that Implats plans to accelerate its investment in AI pilots to determine whether the technology can support safer extraction.

Julie Courtnage, executive director of the Mandela Mining Precinct, highlighted the value of AI as a driver of mining safety before 2025’s Mining Indaba. ‘Mining is not a simple task,’ she told Mining Indaba TV. ‘It is a highly complex series of activities. One of the biggest value drivers in AI is its ability to integrate vast amounts of data, send it in either real-time or practically real-time, to the decision-makers, and give them a composite picture of what’s going on. That’s the first real role of AI in terms of things like predictive maintenance, which contributes to safety and competitiveness.

‘Another important role for AI is the self-learning capability and also the cobot – in other words, the collaborative robot working with a person with machine learning – to improve productivity but also to improve safety,’ she said. ‘The final important thing about digitisation, automation and the role  that AI can play, is in things like optimising mine planning, which impacts safety, competitiveness and productivity. There is potential to even start looking at developing new business models for mining.’

Johan Pretorius, mining, minerals and metals segment lead for Anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric, agrees. ‘While the adoption of new technology is often met with a bit of scepticism, the role it plays in safety is undeniable,’ he says.

‘Today, mining companies can use AI, machine learning and automation to improve operational safety and reduce environmental risks. Ultimately, the safety of miners remains paramount. Autonomous equipment and remote monitoring systems help minimise human exposure to hazardous conditions while also ensuring compliance with stringent environmental regulations.’

Pretorius points to a 2021 white paper by the Global Mining Guidelines Group, which found that the implementation of autonomous systems in the mining industry contributed to a decrease in fatalities. ‘The precise statistics vary according to region and company, but the trend is clear; automation is making mining environments safer.’

It is, but those environments still have people working in them… and people get tired and make mistakes. As Thuthula Balfour, health and safety head at the Minerals Council South Africa, told Mining Weekly: ‘South African mining is generally labour intensive and human beings are not programmed to be forever vigilant. There are normal lapses in concentration, and these can be fatal in environments with high risks.’

Balfour says the best way to mitigate those risks is to focus on human behaviour and efforts to reduce the human element in health and safety incidents. Some mining companies have already moved in this direction by using automation and digital twins, or by introducing remote operating systems.

The Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment recently secured R4 million in funding from the National Research Foundation to develop a multimodal feedback teleoperation and telemanipulation system – essentially, a remote-control pod – for underground mining operations.

The system enables miners to remotely operate underground machinery from offsite locations, where the biggest safety hazard is the coffee urn in the office canteen. ‘This innovation thrives on the premise that workers are no longer needed on the site,’ according to Shengzhi Du of TUT’s Department of Electrical Engineering. ‘This relieves them from the danger of the prevalent workplace hazards. With this technology, workers no longer have to go to the sites, but can be in safe off-site locations and control the mining operations.’

But removing humans entirely from underground operations is impractical, and full automation faces insurmountable social, technical, economic and regulatory barriers. The priority now is on creating a zero-harm working environment for humans. To achieve this, the industry will have to eliminate fatalities and occupational injuries. As the technology continues to develop, the industry is developing the tools to achieve that.

By Mark van Dijk
Image: iStock