Mining

South Africa's gold companies, already mining at the world's deepest depths, are looking to plumb even deeper veins in a new gold rush spurred by record prices. The deeper miners go, the richer the ore being uncovered. The price in dangers, though, includes rockfalls, poisonous gas explosions, flooding and earthquakes. That has stirred up concerns about the safety of miners, who experts say have the worst lot among South Africa's industrial workers.

Thobela Booi arrived in this mining town with hopes of landing a job that would enable him to support his wife and child. He ended up 5,000 feet underground, killed by the fumes of a raging fire. Booi, 30, had been one of hundreds of desperate laborers who risk their lives working in the shadows of legal mining operations, sneaking in through abandoned or poorly secured shafts and making their way through a warren of interconnecting tunnels to the ore.

Squatting along the rocky banks of the Nmai Hka River, villagers labor from dawn till dusk over large wooden pans, scrounging for crumbs from the junta's table. Children barely big enough to swirl the heavy slurry toil alongside men and women, doing backbreaking work that exposes them to toxic mercury.

Rick Price left the mines more than 20 years ago to pursue his call to the ministry. He's a pastor now in a little church in the mountains -- and he longs to go back underground. There's something about mining that tugs at him. It's filthy, loud, exhausting work, and it's dangerous. Some coal seams are so shallow that miners spend their shift on hands and knees.

From offices in a downtown skyscraper overlooking the snowcapped Rockies, Newmont Mining Corp. is intensifying a global hunt for the next mother lode of gold. Spurred by rising prices, Newmont opened one gold mine in Nevada in December and plans to open two more -- another in Nevada and one in Ghana -- this year. Another in Ghana is on tap for 2007. Other corporate prospectors are taking similar steps, dusting off back-burner projects and pouring more money into exploration around the world.

As two coal miners were found dead two days after fire swept through a mine shaft in Melville, W.Va., the Bush administration was signaling a new sensitivity to the industry's dangers. The deaths came about three weeks after 12 miners died following an explosion at the Sago Mine in Tallmansville, W.Va. One trapped miner survived and remained hospitalized Saturday.

Gov. Joe Manchin signed new mine safety rules into law, saying that the requirements for better communications, underground oxygen supplies and faster emergency responses would help prevent tragedies like the two that killed 14 miners this month. "We want to be the benchmark everyone looks to when they mine," Manchin said during the signing ceremony in Charleston, attended by some of the dead miners' relatives. "The sacrifice you all have made will change mining in this country."

Coal mine operators will soon have to store extra oxygen supplies underground and let federal officials know about accidents more quickly, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration said Tuesday. The agency expects to publish a new emergency rule for mines within the next two weeks, agency spokesman Dirk Fillpot said. The agency issues emergency rules only rarely. They go into effect immediately, which is a departure from the typical, lengthy federal rulemaking process.

Duane Gibson, a Washington lobbyist under federal scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff scandal, helped raise money for a California congressman who championed legislation that would benefit Western mining interests that Gibson represented. Last fall, Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), chairman of the House Resources Committee, attached an amendment to a budget bill -- without hearings or floor debate -- that would have opened national forest and other public land to mining.

Demanding greater safety, about 4,000 Mexican workers Tuesday struck at copper mines owned by the operator of a coal mine where 65 men died in an explosion last week. The workers voted to strike at the country's two largest copper mines, La Caridad and Cananea, owned by Grupo Mexico. An additional 1,500 walked out of the company's zinc mine and a processing facility in central Mexico after negotiators failed to reach agreement on a new contract, union officials said.