CARLETONVILLE, South Africa -- The last of 3,200 gold miners trapped by a power failure reached the surface late Thursday after nearly two days underground, witnesses reported.
The workers were stuck 1.3 miles (2 kilometers ) underground in the cavernous Elandstrand New Mine after a large compressed air pipe fell down a shaft about 6 a.m. Wednesday (midnight Tuesday ET). The accident knocked out power and disabled elevators in the mine, which is built like an underground city, complete with trains, trucks and cars.
No one was hurt during the ordeal.
"I'm happy now because we are out and we are alive," said Granny Makau, one of the freed miners and one of scores of women working at Elandstrand.
"No one died so we are happy," she said.
"This was a situation where the people were not really in danger, they were underground," said Graham Briggs, the president of Harmony Gold Mining Company, which oversees operations at the mine.
"It's not really an accident in the sense of an underground accident -- in the sense of a falling rock," Briggs said.
More than a thousand miners had surfaced by midmorning Thursday.
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