More than 3,000 miners were trapped a mile and a half underground in a South African goldmine after the lift shaft was shattered by falling equipment.

Rescuers were last night frantically trying to free the workers at Elandsrand mine, at Carletonville, west of Johannesburg, amid fears that air at the bottom of the shaft was running out.

The miners’ union said that 3,200 workers had already spent a day in a cramped underground space where temperatures could reach 40C (104F). “We are very worried because . . . they might be suffocating,” said Lesiba Seshoka, a union spokesman.

Amelia Soares, of the Harmony Gold Mining Company, South Africa’s third biggest gold mining outfit, said that nobody had been injured, but admitted that the miners faced a critical period while a complicated rescue was being organised.

The lift shaft was damaged when a 45ft compressed air steel pipe at the top broke and plunged to the bottom of the 2.2km (nearly 1½ miles) deep shaft, wrecking steelwork and severing electric cables.

Ms Soares said that engineers were working to adapt an adjacent shaft, which is used to transport waste and pump fresh air into the mine’s depths, so that an emergency hoist can be installed to reach the miners who by midnight last night had been trapped for 13 hours. Rescuers planned to bring the miners to the surface in groups of about 300 at a time. Hopes rose as the first batch of 75 men were successfully hoisted up early this morning.

Ms Soares denied early claims by the National Union of Mineworkers that the entire shaft had collapsed and said that mine managers were in constant contact with foremen below by radio phones. Deon Boqwana, the regional chairman of the union, confirmed later that there was ventilation underground. and that officials were speaking to the trapped miners.

“They are still in good condition but are angry, hungry, frustrated and want to get out of there,” Mr Boqwana said.

The world’s largest gold deposit lies in seams sloping deep to the southwest from Johannesburg, known to African miners as “Egoli”, Zulu for City of Gold. However, reserves near the surface have been exhausted and the mining companies have had to go deeper and deeper to get at the ore. Temperatures deep below the surface are so great that miners wear special jackets packed with ice.

Johannesburg’s gold mines are also among the most dangerous. Last year 113 gold miners were killed in rock collapses, mudslides and gas explosions.

The deepest gold mine in South Africa is AngloGold Ashanti’s Savuka mine, which descends to 12,391ft (3,777m). But AngloGold plans to go even deeper at its Tau Tona mine — to 12,801ft (3,901m), a depth that has never been reached before and where virgin rock temperatures will reach 59C.

Johannesburg was built on gold. In 1885 it was nothing more than the 6,000ft-high top of a rocky ridge, far from any major river, where a few poor Afrikaner farmers grazed sheep. All that changed in 1887 when a Scotsman, John Jack, took a rock sample to Glasgow where it was found to contain gold.

By 1946 gold from beneath Johannesburg accounted for 56 per cent of South Africa’s exports and today the figure is still remarkably high at near 20 per cent. Miners from Zululand, the Transkei, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique describe the mines as the “devil’s workplace”.

Men die when whole tunnels implode after pressure builds up in the deep level rock. More than 70,000 South African miners have died underground in the past 100 years and more than one million have been seriously injured. It has been calculated that one man has given his life for every 1.2 tonnes of South African gold produced.

Times Recommends

• Thousands of Tamils dying in 'welfare camp'
• Jackson 'rebuilt his nose before he died'
• Renewed Iran protests crushed by militia