Reg 16.7 is in force: what it actually requires underground
On 28 March 2025, Chapter 16 of the MHSA regulations was substituted by Government Gazette 52388, Notice 6052. Regulation 16.7 came into force on publication — with no transitional period. If you run underground workings in South Africa, the requirement applies now.
What it actually says
In essence: no person goes underground without an intrinsically-safe device that can determine their last known location if they go missing while in the underground workings. It's triggered by the Section 11 risk assessment for hazards like engulfment, slope failure and water, mud or rock flow. The consequence of non-compliance is real — a shaft without a compliant locator carries the risk of a Section 54 stoppage.
The word that changes everything: "last known"
The regulation isn't asking for a nice live map on a good day. It's asking for a last known location — the location you can still recover after something has already gone wrong. That single phrase is what separates a system that passes from one that doesn't.
Consider what "gone wrong" looks like underground: a collapse, a fire, a flood. Any locating system that depends on a continuous cabled backbone — a leaky feeder, say — severs in exactly those events. The moment you most need a location is the moment the system goes dark. Portal RFID has a different problem: it counts people in and out at the shaft top, but gives you nothing once a worker is underground.
Why a self-healing mesh answers it
A Wirepas mesh works the other way around. Battery-powered anchors relay location hop-by-hop back to a gateway. If a node drops or a section fragments, the mesh re-forms around the loss and the last anchor hop persists — so a location survives the very failure the regulation was written for. There's no backbone to sever, and you can extend coverage past the last connected gateway into the workings, because the anchors carry their own power and their own path home.
What "compliant" needs in practice
Four things, really: an intrinsically-safe device on every underground worker; a location that survives system damage or failure; retrievable position history you can hand to an inspector; and two-way alerting into your control rooms. Get those right and you have the audit trail Reg 16.7 calls for — not just a dashboard, but evidence.
This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice — consult the gazette and your advisors for the authoritative text. MeshTrack is an operational visibility platform; the mine remains responsible for its own legal, safety and emergency-response obligations.