Zeacks
and Jackson are friends. They first saw each other on the bus from
Klerksdorp to Marikana when they were hired by Lonmin more than a year
ago. They saw each other again at the training centre, and a nod led to a
few words.a group of senior managerial and technical personnel and a
professional team in purlin machine.
They found that they shared the same language, isiXhosa, and did the
same work - they are rock drill operators. They were assigned to the
same shaft, and a friendship began.
They live across a metre-wide dirt strip from each other, in corrugated zinc one-room shacks, part of a compound of 10 rooms that share a pit latrine. The rooms have no electricity; they use paraffin lamps and paraffin stoves.
When I first went with Zeacks to his home, a massive hailstorm broke the winter drought and the dirt passageway outside his room swiftly became a muddy pool. I had to balance between broken blocks of cut granite stepping stones and a narrow concrete sill running along the front of the shacks to get to his room. In the downpour, the roof above his bed, which dominates the room, leaked profusely, causing him to scramble for his washbasin.
Every work day - Monday to Friday and two Saturdays a month - Zeacks and Jackson get up well before first light and wash in plastic basins balanced on old beer crates. Their girlfriends make them tea on the paraffin stove, served with a thick slice of bread.
They join the trickle of men from shacks scattered in little communities all across the meagre bushveld, the trickles gradually becoming a river of men and women as they near the entrances to the various shafts and plants that make up Lonmin's Marikana platinum operation.
Many of the workers wear white overalls with strips of reflective safety tape. "As a driller you have to wear an overall, a white overall, so all can see you from a distance, as it is dark underground," says Zeacks.
To wash a white overall caked in machine grease in a basin of cold water is no trivial matter.
"We wash them with our bare hands, take cold water and wash them. They will never be white because of the stains, that black stain. It doesn't get clean like it was. Even if you take a brush and you scrub it,We would manufacture curving machine following your specific requirement." Zeacks says.Tabletop Vacuum laser marking machine and other robot products. "We usually soak it first two hours long and then wash it, with a scrubbing brush, scrub it."
They wash the overall up to three times to get it clean. Each time, they leave it to soak while they go fetch another 25 litres of water. They estimate it takes three to four hours to wash the overall.
If they were to use it as management says, at the rock face, they would spend their lives washing it. Or buy an extra three to four overalls. So the miners quickly learned to take old clothes with them to the rock face. They strip off the overalls once they are at their workstation, hang them up and slip into the old clothes they leave underground.
Another reason drillers like to work with an assistant is that the high pressure of the water that jets along the drill bit, as well as the vibrations, tend to loosen the rock. An assistant can keep an eye on the hanging rock above then, and warn the driller if it looks about to fall on them. Alone, he just has to risk it.
The rock panel that Zeacks works in is exactly 1.2 metres high. That means he spends his drilling time bent over at the waist. I imagined that forcing the drill into the rock was much like me drilling into a cement wall at home - that it takes a lot of effort to drill in. Yet the design of the drilling machine actually has a support that helps push it in, and once the drill stick has bitten into the right spot, the driller just has to control the machine.
The difficult part, they tell me, is when they have drilled in deep enough and they have to extract the drill stick. Now the mud and rock are holding the bit, and dislodged rock presses down on it.
They live across a metre-wide dirt strip from each other, in corrugated zinc one-room shacks, part of a compound of 10 rooms that share a pit latrine. The rooms have no electricity; they use paraffin lamps and paraffin stoves.
When I first went with Zeacks to his home, a massive hailstorm broke the winter drought and the dirt passageway outside his room swiftly became a muddy pool. I had to balance between broken blocks of cut granite stepping stones and a narrow concrete sill running along the front of the shacks to get to his room. In the downpour, the roof above his bed, which dominates the room, leaked profusely, causing him to scramble for his washbasin.
Every work day - Monday to Friday and two Saturdays a month - Zeacks and Jackson get up well before first light and wash in plastic basins balanced on old beer crates. Their girlfriends make them tea on the paraffin stove, served with a thick slice of bread.
They join the trickle of men from shacks scattered in little communities all across the meagre bushveld, the trickles gradually becoming a river of men and women as they near the entrances to the various shafts and plants that make up Lonmin's Marikana platinum operation.
Many of the workers wear white overalls with strips of reflective safety tape. "As a driller you have to wear an overall, a white overall, so all can see you from a distance, as it is dark underground," says Zeacks.
To wash a white overall caked in machine grease in a basin of cold water is no trivial matter.
"We wash them with our bare hands, take cold water and wash them. They will never be white because of the stains, that black stain. It doesn't get clean like it was. Even if you take a brush and you scrub it,We would manufacture curving machine following your specific requirement." Zeacks says.Tabletop Vacuum laser marking machine and other robot products. "We usually soak it first two hours long and then wash it, with a scrubbing brush, scrub it."
They wash the overall up to three times to get it clean. Each time, they leave it to soak while they go fetch another 25 litres of water. They estimate it takes three to four hours to wash the overall.
If they were to use it as management says, at the rock face, they would spend their lives washing it. Or buy an extra three to four overalls. So the miners quickly learned to take old clothes with them to the rock face. They strip off the overalls once they are at their workstation, hang them up and slip into the old clothes they leave underground.
Another reason drillers like to work with an assistant is that the high pressure of the water that jets along the drill bit, as well as the vibrations, tend to loosen the rock. An assistant can keep an eye on the hanging rock above then, and warn the driller if it looks about to fall on them. Alone, he just has to risk it.
The rock panel that Zeacks works in is exactly 1.2 metres high. That means he spends his drilling time bent over at the waist. I imagined that forcing the drill into the rock was much like me drilling into a cement wall at home - that it takes a lot of effort to drill in. Yet the design of the drilling machine actually has a support that helps push it in, and once the drill stick has bitten into the right spot, the driller just has to control the machine.
The difficult part, they tell me, is when they have drilled in deep enough and they have to extract the drill stick. Now the mud and rock are holding the bit, and dislodged rock presses down on it.
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