Technical Difficulties

In the sense of the mine, not my blog. Klipwal is experiencing some growing pains at the moment which has led to a slightly unusual last couple of days for me. It all started sometime Monday evening when the pump at 7-level seized up because of the lime deposits building up over months of use. This pump takes our natural drinking water source, a fissure about 200 meters below ground, and pumps it up to the surface where it is stored in tanks and distributed amongst the offices and houses. On Tuesday morning, they noticed that the tanks were low so they ordered a new pump that would be delivered and installed the next day.

I was planning on doing my usual underground mapping on Wednesday, but when I got to the truck at 6:10 in the morning, Thys asked if I could help install the new pump, so I took Phillimon and Leonard with me and we went down to 6 level with the pump and a group of other workers. Luckily the rails on 6 level had recently been refurbished so they could place the new pump on a mine cart, or cocopan as they call it here, and wheel it to the ladders down to 7 level. After that, the process got trickier. The pump is extremely heavy, and takes at least 4 if not 6 people to carry it, so lowering it down on the ladders took extreme care. The workers rigged up a rope system and slowly lowered it down the 40 meters to 7 level while I went ahead with Thys down a different set of ladders to get to the old pump and start dismantling it.

The pumping site sits in the far northern nook of 7 level and there is a single fluorescent light creating an eerie glow over the area. The old pump was rigged up on a steel frame and each bolt was painstakingly taken out by Thys and I before the group of us managed to detach the pump from the frame and move it to the side. Eventually the new pump arrived, which was identical to the old one minus the rust and lime deposits. The process was reversed and we bolted the new pump into place, installed new engine belts and eventually tested it out. The pump seemed to hum along nicely and the reservoir of water that had built up behind the adjacent dam was slowly beginning to drain. It was a tedious process that lasted a good 6 hours of hard work underground, and it gave me a good taste of what a mining engineer has to do on a daily basis. I definitely prefer mapping.

Now it was just a matter of the water tanks at the surface refilling so we could have running water again, which we had been without for almost 24 hours. I waited and waited Wednesday night, and no running water came. Thursday morning, same story. Turns out the workers in the plant had inadvertently started using the water from the drinking water tank for the plant processes, which has left us still with no running water. So today I helped the crew at the plant carry pipes and cut pipes and switch on pumps and switch off pumps, hopefully in some way helping the problem. Eventually everything was put in its right place again and the water was filling up the tanks, but we now must wait again for the tank to fill up. As I'm typing up this post at 3 in the afternoon, I'll just check the tap one more time...yep, as I expected, still no water. Fortunately I have a stockpile of full, chilled water bottles in the fridge and some juice to go with that, but it's definitely getting to that point where I could really use a shower.