It is reported that HWANGE Colliery Company Limited is set to resume normal loading of coal this week following repairs to major mining equipment that had broken down two weeks ago.

Mr Burzil Dube public relations manager of HWANGE Colliery in an interview with Sunday Business confirmed that owing to a breakdown of the thickener normal loading of coal had been affected but said that the situation had since been rectified.

He said that the company was concentrating on full production after scaling operations while on annual shutdown. Mr Dube said that “We were on an annual shutdown for two weeks and resumed operations on 5 January, people misconstrued this as retrenchment. We have adopted survival strategies.”

He added that “One of our strategies saw us reducing our shifts for both productive and non-productive areas from the traditional three to two. Redundant workers in other areas would be shifted to productive areas.”

He said the company had temporarily suspended the recruitment of contract workers.

Mr Dube said that “We have been receiving numerous calls from our customers making inquiries about delays in deliveries but we want to assure them that we are doing our best despite these challenging economic conditions.” He added that “We had experienced problems in loading for over a week owing to the breakdown of our thickener but it has since been attended to and normal operations are expected to resume.”

HCCL employs more than 3 500 workers in both its productive and non-productive operations. HCCL has seen a marked decrease in coal delivery volumes largely owing to shortage of foreign currency to purchase spare parts for repairing its machinery and with one of its major extracting machinery, the dragline down, production is at its lowest.

(Sourced from sundaynews.co.zw)