Aurora to double its acid water pumps at Grootvlei
Thursday, 05 August 2010 |  Sapa  |  0 comment

The Grootvlei mine near Springs, Gauteng, was making repairs to equipment which would almost double the capabilities of acid mine water pumping, Aurora Mines, the mine's owners, said yesterday.

"By Friday we hope to be pumping up to full capacity," Louis Lamsley, the general manager for mining operations, said yesterday.He said repairs had been done to pipe columns in the water treatment plant. Eskom would be giving the go ahead for additional power to be used in the extra pumping, Lamsley said.

"We are opening a fifth and sixth column and this will increase the pumping capabilities," he said.If this toxic water is left to rise underground, it will flood the Witwatersrand basins and have catastrophic consequences for the environment, human and animal life and future mining. Acid water is formed underground when old mine shafts and tunnels fill up with water.

The water oxidises with the sulphide mineral iron pyrite, better known as fool's gold, and starts decanting into the environment, in a process known as acid mine drainage. Last week in a briefing held by Aurora and attended by representatives from the Departments of Water and Environmental Affairs and Mineral Resources - Aurora said it cost R6.5 million a month to run the water treatment plant.

It also claimed that a government subsidy of R5 million a month had not been received since October last year.

"We have still not received any funding and we have not heard anything back from the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs since the briefing," he said.

Marius Keet, the department's acting director of institutional establishment, said the issue was "at ministerial level" but would not provide any more detail.

Acid mine drainage was affecting the western, central and eastern basins of the Witwatersrand gold fields area, which had negatively affected the Vaal and the Crocodile river systems.Activist Mariette Liefferink, from the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, said she had heard recently that Aurora was pumping out acid mine water without it having been treated.

"I heard that the water was being pumped into the nearby Blesbokspruit untreated, no lime or oxidation," she said. Acid mine water was currently 600m below Johannesburg and, if left unchecked, would spill onto the streets in about 18 months, damaging buildings in the city, she said. Lamsley refuted this saying "we are treating the water with lime and activating it with compressed air". In 2002, acid water began decanting out of a disused mine on Randfontein Estates about 42km southwest of Johannesburg but media reports on the topic only surfaced in 2007.

Reports on the issue last month further highlighted the seriousness of the problem.