Residents of Stilfontein told stories of skidding cars and moving houses after a large earthquake on Wednesday.
“It was terrible. I got so scared,” said Thaliti Monyatsi from her home in the small North West town.
She said that in her six years in the mining area she had often experienced tremors, “but it is the first time I felt something like this”.
The quake hit at about midday, and measured five on the Richter scale, the Council for Geoscience said.
The earth started moving while Margaret van Wyk was sitting outside her house.
“I got such a fright — I was trembling,” she said.
When the quake finished, her whole house had shifted to one side, and the roof was torn away from the wall, Van Wyk said.
She was waiting for an engineer to come and assess whether it was safe to enter the house.
Desre Dreyer, who owns a pub in the town, had to rush there the moment the earthquake finished, to deal with the damage.
“All the alcohol was broken and spilt all over the floor,” she said.
She had been driving her car at the time, and it had skidded over the road — “like it was sliding on wet tar”.
“It was really not a nice feeling,” she said.
Dreyer then went to her children’s school to check up on them.
Police have reported only minor injuries resulting from the quake so far. Mines in the area have reported 13 injuries, but no deaths.
However, most residents of Stilfontein are going to have problems getting their lives back together.
“My house inside looks terrible. The ceiling is torn off, and bricks are sticking out all over,” said Monyatsi.
Monyatsi’s insurance company does not cover damage from earthquakes, so she and her husband are not sure how they are going to rebuild their home.
Quake caused by mining activity
Meanwhile, an expert said the earthquake, which drove thousands of miners to the surface at Stilfontein, was “a secondary effect” of mining activity.
“This is probably a reactivation of an existing fault line. It is one of those natural things, no one is to blame.
“It is a secondary effect from mining activity,” said Ian Saunders, project leader of the South African National Seismograph Network at the Council for Geoscience in Pretoria.
“These are unpredictable and unpreventable.”
About 3 200 miners at DRDGold’s operations were being evacuated on Wednesday afternoon after the earthquake.
“Our main priority now is to bring people back to safety and to the surface,” said DRDGold spokesperson James Duncan.
He said 13 miners who were injured were being treated at the scene.
DRDGold stock price falls
Gold miner DRDGold on Wednesday fell to a four-year low, or its lowest level since December 1 2000, of R4,50 on the JSE Securities Exchange (JSE) after news about the tremor.
At 4.20pm, DRDGold’s shares on the JSE was quoted at R4,95, down six cents or 1,2% from its previous close.
“DRDGold has been hit hard by the strong rand and the tremor today has seen the company having to evacuate workers at its mines in the area and that could see one or two days of production lost. The losses in the stock came when the United States market came in and DRDGold’s US investors sold their stock,” a Johannesburg broker said.
DRDGold’s North West operations consist of its Buffelsfontein and Hartebeestfontein gold mines, which are currently being restructured.