Qualla: Koegas Mine

Koegas Mine: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They called the settlement outside Prieska "the lung location." In the 1960s, Cape Asbestos Company relocated widows of dead miners to Marydale, and the cluster of houses became known by the medical condition its residents shared. The women's husbands had worked at Koegas, a crocidolite mine 44 miles northwest of Prieska that grew from unprofitable beginnings in 1893 to become the largest blue asbestos mine in the world. By the time it closed in 1979, it had shaped the geology of a legal precedent as deeply as it had scarred the landscape.

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Koegas Mine: Blue Fibers in Ironstone

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The geology at Koegas is distinctive. Asbestos fibers run vertically through bands of ironstone rock, and intense geological folding along normal and reverse faults has stacked multiple bands atop one another in the Westerberg deposit, creating an unusually concentrated ore body....

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Koegas Mine: Boom and Bust and Boom

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cape Asbestos Company Limited opened the mine in 1893, but early operations were small-scale and unprofitable. The mine produced nothing at all in 1903. When production resumed in 1907, it turned a modest profit of 6,900 pounds. The First World War transformed the operation: dema...

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Koegas Mine: The Human Cost

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The underground workforce was male, but women and children were employed above ground to break asbestos into fibers by hand and sort them into grades. Mine inspectors raised safety concerns throughout the operation's history. Housing, sanitation, and medical facilities were consi...

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Koegas Mine: Justice Across Oceans

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1998, former workers and their families filed suit against Cape Plc in the English High Court. Cape argued that because the mine had been owned by its South African subsidiary, the case belonged in South African courts. The matter climbed to the House of Lords, then Britain's ...

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Koegas Mine: What Remains

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The South African government began cleaning up the Koegas site in 2007. Tailings have been sown with grass and fenced off. The most accessible asbestos has been removed. But the mine's legacy is woven into Prieska itself. Streets in the town were paved with asphalt containing asb...

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