They had finished their shift. At the bottom of the Number 2 shaft, more than a hundred men crowded into the double-decker cage that would carry them back toward daylight, nearly 1,900 metres above. It was a few minutes after half past eight in the evening on 10 May 1995. Somewhere above them, on level 56, a twelve-ton underground locomotive took a wrong turn and lost control. It smashed through a barrier built only to stop small carts and dropped into the open shaft. What happened in the next few seconds remains the deadliest elevator accident in recorded history.
The Vaal Reefs gold mine spread out beneath the dry highveld near the town of Orkney, in South Africa's North West province, part of the Witwatersrand reef that has yielded more gold than anywhere else on Earth. Reaching that gold meant going deep. The men killed that night were ascending from level 62, almost 1,900 metres below the surface, where rock temperatures climb past anything comfortable and the air must be cooled to keep people alive. They were ordinary miners at the end of an ordinary day. Most were migrant workers, far from home: their families lived across South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana and Eswatini, sustained by wages earned in the heat and dark of the shaft.
The falling locomotive struck the rising cage somewhere in the shaft. The impact sprang open the elevator's detaching hook, and the cage tore loose from its cable and plunged to the bottom, where the locomotive landed on top of it and crushed it to a third of its size. Every one of the more than a hundred miners aboard was killed. Only the locomotive's driver survived, having leapt clear before it went over the edge. Investigators later found a cruel irony in the physics: had the hook held, the cables were elastic enough to have absorbed the blow. The cables could have saved them. The safety device meant to protect them did not.
Roughly 400 miners still underground were brought out through the Number 5 shaft. Rescuers descended a separate shaft and worked their way through miles of tunnels to reach the wreckage. By the next night they had recovered only six bodies, mostly men thrown clear of the cage; reaching the rest meant cutting into the crushed steel with blowtorches. The remains came up on stretchers, wrapped in blankets. Pik Botha, the minister responsible, called it the most gruesome sight he had ever seen. The heat that makes deep mining so punishing now worked against the living, hastening decomposition. Some rescuers spent as long as 61 hours below ground, and afterward were offered trauma counselling. President Nelson Mandela declared a national day of mourning. A month later, 45 of the dead were buried together in a single mass funeral.
This was one of the first major mine investigations after South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, and for the first time the workers themselves had a seat at the table, represented from the start by the National Union of Mineworkers. The judge-led inquiry found that the company had ignored urgent safety recommendations made after a near-identical, non-fatal incident three years earlier. The report called for the mine's owner, a subsidiary of Anglo American, to be prosecuted for culpable homicide, and it helped drive a new Mine Health and Safety Act. A trust was created for the bereaved; 431 dependents became its beneficiaries. The Number 2 shaft had killed before too: in 1980, a falling cage there claimed 31 lives. Together with a 1987 explosion that dropped a cage at the nearby St Helena mine, these remain the three worst elevator disasters ever recorded, all of them in South Africa's gold mines.
The Vaal Reefs mine lies at approximately 26.94 degrees south, 26.77 degrees east, near the town of Orkney on the Vaal River in North West province. The flat, mine-dotted highveld is studded with the pale grey-yellow mine dumps that mark a century of gold extraction; the river threads through from the east. Recommended viewing altitude is 7,000 to 10,000 feet for a clear sense of the surrounding goldfields. The nearest airfield is Klerksdorp (FAKD), about 20 km north; Potchefstroom (FAPS) lies to the northeast, and OR Tambo International at Johannesburg (FAOR) is roughly 160 km northeast. Visibility on the highveld is typically excellent in the dry winter months from May to September.