The rest of the 3,200 gold miners working for Harmony Gold Mining Co. trapped in South Arica were rescued and brought to the surface, the latest media reports said.

The miners were trapped more than 1 mile underground since yesterday in Africa’s third-largest gold producer’s Elandsrand mine.  The final 45 miners were brought to the surface in a cage at about 10.p.m. local time, the mining company spokesman Amelia Soares said.

''The last 45 are at surface, and everybody is well,'' Soares said by phone today. ''We're very grateful for that.''

With the main shaft inaccessible due to a ruptured a air pipe that fell in it, the rest of the miners were carried to safety through the shaft used for waste. President Thabo Mbeki was very pleased with the rescue teams that made the operation a success and praised them, the Independent Online said.

South African gold mines are the world’s deepest but at the same time most unsafe. Tremors, gas explosions and rock falls are the main threats to African miners, of which 113 were killed last year. With an estimated number of 180,000 miners digging for gold in South Africa, a country that struggles with unemployment, the death toll in metal mining since 1904 to 2002 had reached 56,850.

''We are very lucky. Shaft accidents often lead to multi fatalities. Maintenance could be an issue'' Thabo Gazi, the government's chief inspector of mines, said about the mine that is 31 years old.

After the ruptured air pipe blocked access into the mine through the main shaft, rescuers used a slow utility elevator with a maximum capacity of 75 people. With each ascent taking about a half an hour, by Thursday morning the elevator had brought more than half of the men and women miners to the surface.

The company’s President Graham Briggs said in an interview that the workers were actually never in real danger, hunger being the only thing that could have affected them if the evacuations would have lasted longer.

"It's not really an accident in the sense of an underground accident, in the sense of a falling rock," Briggs said.

After this incident, South Africa’s Minister of Minerals and Energy Buyelwa Sonjica announced future plans of a maintenance audit at the country’s mines. Details regarding the time when the audit will launch, or whether it will cover all the mines weren’t yet released.

"The president wants an audit of all mines. I talked to him on the phone about this and we are yet to go into detail, which I will share with you later," Sonjica said.