5 October 2010
The Hungarian tailings dam accident – images of the failure of the impounding embankment
Posted by Dave Petley
Thanks to both Peter Diehl, PeterOi and an anonymous commenter for pointing out the locations of images of the embankment that failed to release the landslide of toxic sludge in Hungary. The best one is probably this image, from Der Standard in Austria:
The failure appears to have occurred in the corner of the embankment, as shown in this Google Earth image:
I cannot quite work out the internal structure of the embankment from the image – it looks rather peculiar, but I’ll reserve judgement until better information is available.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has finally cottoned onto the story, which now appears near to the top of the BBC News front page. The BBC article has a good image of the impact of the material downhill from the breach, paired with a map of the location:
The article also notes that there are now real concerns about this sludge causing an environmental disaster when and it it enters the river system; and that four people died and six remain missing.
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
There are several reports and a pictory of 35 photos in Yahoo News. Of the pictures, No. 2 shows the embankment failure from a different angle:http://tinyurl.com/2al8y52(Photos are small but good enough quality to view them at zoom 400x.)I am so upset to think how a time bomb like this could be permitted to be built in the middle of a town!!! Even if the site has been there since 1943, modern governments must have seen the disaster waiting to happen and residents must have been complaining all the time! Was there no way to close that down before disaster strikes?
The best collection I've found may be seen here: http://goo.gl/G7UqThese have a number of closeup photos of the dam and show another large fracture further down the embankment which could indicate a sliding failure.My first reaction would be (after looking at the steepness of the structure) to assume internal seepage but the weight of the sludge and this additional crack may prove otherwise
A german online magazine also has some very good material on this event online:http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-60236.htmlKind regards,Thorsten
[…] many ways this event is reminiscent of the dreadful tailings dam failure at Ajkai Timfoldgyar in Hungary in 2010, which I covered extensively at the time. Back in 2009 I wrote about an academic study that had […]