Hundreds of Miners Were Trapped

Hundreds of Miners Were Trapped for Months —Until an Extraordinary Two-Man Rescue Mission

Story by Alexandra Wexler- Click here for the link to this story from Wall Street Journal.

STILFONTEIN, South Africa—With hundreds of miners trapped below ground without food or water, two men from down the road volunteered to venture where no police, government officials or professional rescuers were willing to go.

On their first descent into the shaft this week, Mandla Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi, wearing white hardhats, headlamps and T-shirts, stepped out of a red cage dangling on a cable from a crane on the surface 4,200 feet above them. Their lights illuminated a sea of emaciated faces, men crowded into a chamber who were crying and pleading to be saved from the pitch black of the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine. The miners’ lights had burned out weeks or months earlier.