South Africa: Rescuers were battling last night to save 28 South African miners who were were trapped in collapsed shafts after an earthquake hit a gold mining area. Earlier, 14 of the trapped men were pulled to safety.
Officials from gold mining company Drdgold said the miners were about 2.4km (1.5 miles) underground in a shaft near Stilfontein, which was cut off by fallen rock, but which had life support systems with air and water.
"The guys are digging like mad at the moment trying to get to them," Drdgold spokesman Ilja Graulich said.
Union officials said as many as 300 other miners were waiting for safety inspection work to give them the all-clear for evacuation.
The quake, described by local seismologists as very exceptional, measured 5.0 on the Richter scale and was felt in Johannesburg at 12:16pm local time. The epicentre was placed near Stilfontein, a town 155km (97 miles) southwest of Johannesburg, experts at the Council for Geoscience in Pretoria said.
The National Union of Mineworkers said 300 miners were waiting to be evacuated. A spokesman for the Solidarity miners' union said they did not appear to be in any danger.
"It is just that they can't come up because of prospective damage to the shaft," Solidarity spokesman Dirk Hermann said.
The quake, which jolted buildings in Johannesburg, injured 23 miners at Drdgold's North West mines and others in Stilfontein. "There is quite serious damage . . . We are aware of 38 people that were injured, but they are minor injuries, no serious injuries," said police Supt Louis Jacobs from Stilfontein.
The mining company had evacuated about three-quarters of the 3,200 miners underground when the quake hit the area, a key mining region for South Africa, which is the world's largest gold and platinum producer.
Drdgold said its seismic monitoring system picked up four large seismic events between 10.15am and 10.22am and a number of smaller ones. In Stilfontein, Supt Jacobs said the main concern of emergency services was the structural safety of those buildings damaged. "We have sent out engineers from the council to check the buildings that were damaged, to make sure that they are safe," he said.
Experts at the Council for Geoscience said small earthquakes triggered by underground mining operations happen in South Africa on an almost daily basis, but yesterday's quake was exceptional.
"It is difficult to determine the cause. The magnitude tells us that it is most probably a re-activation of an old fault . . . a secondary effect of mining," said Ian Saunders, a geotechnologist at the council.
Drdgold said it was too early to speculate about the cause of the earthquake.
A colleague of Mr Saunders, seismologist Eldridge Kgaswane, said the earthquake was exceptional. "In normal cases you would have a magnitude of 1, 2 or in exceptional cases 3, so this is very exceptional."