Heritage Cases

The area where mining operation will be conducted is located approximately 15.5 km on the south west of Musina to Mopane along the N1 route on portion of the remaining extent of the farm Verbaard 53 MT within the jurisdiction of the Musina local Municipality, Vhembe district in the Limpopo Province. The type of mineral to be mined is Sand (General) and Dimension stone. The method that will be employed is a very basic form of open pit mining, and a 5 ha area will be demarcated for mining activities. Sand will be mined along rivers; it is often dug up with backhoes, shovels or bare hands. Dimension Stone is produced from quarrying. Quarry operations typically involve isolating a mass of stone by cutting it free from the parent mass on all sides but one. The isolated mass is then lifted or separated from the parent mass by breaking it free or by undercutting it with a wire or chain saw. The freed stone can either be a mill block (block suitable for either sale or resizing) or a quarry block (a much larger block size). Quarry blocks are subdivided by breaking them into smaller blocks that can be removed from the quarry and sent to the mill. Typical mill blocks range in size from 12 to 30 t, but they can reach weights as large as 65 t. Quarry operations thus involve cutting the stone, breaking the stone, and removing the stone from the quarry. A front-end loader will be utilised to load the material into haulage trucks and transported to the end user and sold.