Except for a trickle of traffic in and out of the entrance gates, the scene outside Lily Mine is eerily silent.
Here and there the ear picks up some sounds, but it is hardly the reverberation of mining machinery - more like a tree-felling machine.
A little over 130 days ago the place was a hive of activity after the rock-fall that led to three miners ending up trapped underground while about 80 of their colleagues escaped within a whisker of their lives.
The container where Pretty Nkambule, Yvonne Mnisi and Solomon Nyirenda were working was swallowed up whole.
Other mining equipment - very large contraptions - also vanished underground on that fateful day, February 5.
At the time Lily Mine had 482 employees. Given the silence that permeated the area on Tuesday, it is not clear how many of those men - and women - are still actively on duty.
Among the lucky ones is Clifford Smith, who once worked in human resources for the mine.
He recently got a job at trade union Solidarity, which represents a fraction of the workforce at Lily.
When there was still promise and the wounds were fresh, about 232 of the workers were promised they’d be “used in the decline and re-commissioning project, about 60 were to be moved into Barbrook and 145 used in a dump retreatment exercise that is being initiated”.
That hope has faded as virtually none of those promises have come to fruition.
Able-bodied men are idle and the weaker characters among them have taken to the bottle, ostensibly to while away time and wait for the mine to re-open.
Families that depended on their breadwinners being gainfully employed at the mine suffer the loss of income the most. The plate on the table is no longer there.
Those affiliated to Solidarity, at least, have seen the trade union take up the cudgels on their behalf to speak to schools to exempt mineworkers’ dependents from paying (school) fees. Solidarity has even distributed food parcels among their 55 members.
For the rest, the reality of the situation is even grimmer. The promised April salaries that were due on the 29th, not the usual pay day, did not go into their accounts. When the money finally came, it was a mere fraction of their normal pay, as low as 35 percent.
As it stands, those who had jobs here are hoping that the R130 million needed to open up a new entrance to the area where the container is believed to be will be raised.
The “when” and the “how” of raising these funds is not in their hands. Once access is gained and the three miners are brought back - dead or alive, but more likely dead at this stage - mining operations will then resume.
And only then can people start their lives all over again.
Sunday Independent