Tailings Management Is About Water Management

One common denominator for most TSF failures in the last four decades has been inadequate water management. Whether it was pond location control, excessive seepage, high phreatic surfaces in the dams, poor seasonal planning or monitoring, or uncontrolled groundwater issues that were not considered in design, water has been at the core of many such unfortunate events. This presentation will discuss some of these failures and how water can be identified as the “real culprit” in most cases. It will also discuss some leading practices in water management as they relate to dam safety. The presentation will also take a hard look at (and bust) some myths, that somehow found a place in tailings management practice, and which have no impact in ensuring resilience and robustness of TSFs when managing upset water conditions.

Lessons for Tailings Managers and Engineers from Maritime Industry Failures

In this presentation, a parallel is drawn to some real-life case studies of catastrophic failures from the maritime industry and its own unfortunate events, and what we – in the mining industry - could learn from them. The parallel discusses causation from both a technical and a human performance perspective, noting that commonality with tailings management is strikingly close. Furthermore, the presentation discusses how ill-defined, uninformed decision-making processes and human errors resulted in such tragedies, or impacted the outcomes and consequences of unwanted events the maritime industry has seen in the last couple of decades. The mining industry is still human-centric when it comes to dealing with mother nature and its elements in a natural resources sector, no matter how much technology, automation, and AI is being implemented. Learning how to improve human performance and minimize human errors is most likely one of the more challenging aspects of a tailings facility risk management program, needing increased attention.

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