What is tailing dam failure?
A tailings dam at an iron ore mine jointly owned by Vale S.A. and BHP and suffered a catastrophic failure releasing around 60 million cubic meters of iron waste into the Doce River which reached the Atlantic Ocean. Brumadinho dam disaster. January 25, 2019.
Could the Hungarian tailings dam tragedy happen in Alberta?
Sadly, the tailings dam failure in Hungary is not unique. Every year between two and five of the more than 3,500 tailings dams in the world experience major failures….Could the Hungarian tailings dam tragedy happen in Alberta?
| Document | Responsible Government Department | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency Preparedness Plan | Dam Safety Section – Alberta Environment | Confidential |
What causes tailing dam failures?
Causes for past tailings dam failures have been attributed to water-related events, e.g. unusual rainfall [47]. Seasonal variability, drought and flood occurrence have a strong influence on waste containment and voids stability [55, 65].
How many tailings dams are in Australia?
In 2019 BHP announced that 32 of its 67 tailing dams were built using the upstream method and classified as ‘high risk or worse. ‘ Four of the five ‘extreme risk’ dams are in Australia – Mt Whaleback iron ore mine in WA and three at Olympic Dam in South Australia.
What is a tailings dam used for?
Water retention tailings dams are mainly used for mineral operations that plan to store high volumes of water. Water storage may be required to keep a processing plant operational during the dry season or where surface water inundation can occur especially if the impoundment is in a catchment area.
What is the importance of tailings dam?
Tailings dams are used to store water and waste that come as by products from the mining process. It is estimated there are at least 3,500 tailings dams around the world.
Why have so many tailings dams failed in recent years?
The number of tailings dam failures has doubled in the past 20 years. Advances in mining technology have made it possible to exploit lower grade deposits despite decreasing commodity prices, which means disposing of more rejects and putting more pressure on tailings facilities.
How many tailing dams are there in the world?
Tailings, most often in the form of a wet slurry, are conventionally stored above-ground behind earthen dams. There is no comprehensive global registry of tailings dams. It is estimated there are around 18,000 dams, 3,500 of which are active. However, that number may be much higher.
What are tailings made up of?
1.2 What are tailings and tailings storage facilities? Tailings are a combination of the fine-grained (typically silt-sized, in the range from 0.001 to 0.6 mm) solid materials remaining after the recoverable metals and minerals have been extracted from mined ore, together with the water used in the recovery process.
What happens to tailings after mining is finished?
Because tailings originate in slurry form they are dumped in or near water, contaminating the water and destroying aquatic life. Tailings also can be transported by wind or water to contaminate other areas.
What happens to tailings dams?
Tailings are pumped into a pond to allow the sedimentation – or separation – of solids from the water. The water removed from tailings dams can be, and often is, later reused in the mine’s processing cycles.
How many tailings dams are there in the world?
There is no comprehensive global registry of tailings dams. It is estimated there are around 18,000 dams, 3,500 of which are active.
What happened to the Merriespruit dam?
There, on 22 February 1994, the Merriespruit No 4 tailings dam failed after a torrential downpour and some 600,000m 3 of water and tailings poured over a distance of 4km, engulfing 80 Merriespruit homes and claiming the lives of 17 people.
What happened to the tailings dam in South Africa?
The tailings dam is situated 320 m up-slope of Merriespruit, a suburb of Virginia in the Free State Goldfields of South Africa. More than 2·5 million tonnes of liquefied tailings ripped through the sleeping mining village. Eighty houses were largely swept away and 200 others were severely damaged. Seventeen people were killed.
How long did the Merriespruit disaster take to be settled?
On 10 In the case of the Merriespruit incident of 1994, where the tailings dam had been insured, the insurance company liquidated compensation for damages to all the people affected by the disaster within three weeks.
What happened to the Mount Polley tailings dam?
The model was verified against laboratory cases as well as two field cases reported in the literature, the failures of the Mount Polley tailings dam in Canada in 2015 and the Merriespruit dam in South Africa in 1994.