Heritage Cases

The Mining area consists of 35.1275 ha between the inner bank boundary of Farm 248 and the middle of the Vaal river boundary of Rooipoort Farm. The area consists of the border pillar along the river which has been excluded from other rights issued. The area will be mined in blocks of 100m x 100m which consist of 1ha. There will never be more than one block open. The following is a description of a typical South African alluvial diamond mining operation, which is also being utilized at Schmidsdrift. The mining method being employed is a strip mining process with oversize material from the gravel scalping and the tailings from the plant, being used as backfill material prior to final rehabilitation. Gravels are excavated, loaded and transported to the nearby treatment facility using articulated dump trucks. Gravels are then loaded onto a vibrating grizzley and the +32 mm oversize material is discarded back into the open pit (about 55% reduction). The remaining -32 mm fraction is loaded into a series of 2 sixteen foot rotary pans, each with a treatment capacity of 20 tph. Tracer test are done regularly to ensure to ensure that that the pans are operating at the correct density. Concentrate is trapped continuously from each of the pans every three hours into three ton holding bins and transported with trucks to totally enclosed final recovery unit which is situated on Holpan near Windsorton, which is designed to use both X-ray and grease diamond recovery methods. The operational phase of the mining operation will include the mining of alluvial diamonds by means of open cast mining with machinery in approximately 100m x 100m Blocks. Soil will be removed from the first block, where after it will be stored separately on the high ground of the proposed mining area. Stored soil will be kept separate from overburden and will not be used for the building or maintenance of access roads. Exposed diamondiferous gravel of Block 1 will them be removed by means of a back actor and loaded onto a tipper truck, which will transport it to the central mineral processing plant. At the plant the diamondiferous gravel will be sorted by means of a grizzly screen grid and all material larger than 100 mm will be separated from the rest. This material will be used in the backfilling stage. Screened material smaller than 100 mm will be transported to a stockpiling area via frond-end loader. from here it will be transported to a conveyor belt, which will feed it onto a wet rotary screen and then directly onto 2 x 16 feet washing pans.