Unfortunately, it is now clear that on 21st July another tailings dam failure occurred in China, again with serious effects.  Adrian Moon has very kindly provided the following description: There has been a major release of tailings from the Xichuan Minjiang Electrolytic Manganese Plant in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture. Accounts are here and here and there are others. Photographs can be found here, video here. The plant …

Regular readers will remember that I covered in a number of posts the tailings dam failure at Kolontar in Hungary, which flooded a town with bauxite waste with fatal consequences.  At the time we tried to “crowd source” an interpretation of what had happened, and as a result we speculated that the failure might have resulted from a foundation failure of the dam caused by high pore pressures, which led …

The index.hu website has a set of images taken of the top of the dam at Ajkai Timfoldgyar / Kolontar.  These are helpful in confirming observations from the aerial imagery featured yesterday that a section of the tailings dam has moved.  This images shows the pipe running across the top surface of the dam: As expected, the image shows that the main block shown has moved to the right and …

Thanks once again to Peter Diehl, the causes of failure of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar / Kolontar tailings dam are becoming clearer, and appear to support initial suspicions.  There is an excellent gallery of images here, of which this is the most interesting in this context: This is the damaged (cracked) section of the north side of the dam.  Zooming into the cracks on the top of the dam shows this: …

Thanks again for Peter Diehl for his help with this one.  Greenpeace have collected and released some oblique aerial images of the site at Ajkai Timfoldgyar (Kolontar) that are revealing.  They are available on the Der Standard website.  The best image of the dam itself is this one: Note the crack in the dam surface on the left side of the image. It is also worth noting that the dam …

The clean up at the Ajkai Timfoldgyar tailings debris flow accident site continues today, with continued concern about the potential for pollution of the downstream rivers from the environmentally-damaging debris.  I do not wish to speculate on the cause of this accident, but will note that foundation failure is a well-established failure mode for tailings dams – see for example the excellent wise-uranium.org site, which has a section on typical …

As predicted, a number of interesting images are now available of the site of the breach that caused the Ajkai Timfoldgyar tailings debris flow in Hungary on Monday.  Thanks again to Peter Diehl for his tireless work in seeking out and highlighting the best images.  The best slide show, surely destined to become an invaluable teaching aid, is available at this link: http://galeria.index.hu/belfold/2010/10/05/legifelvetelek_az_atszakadt_gatrol/ In terms of the failure that caused …

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 …

News today, barely covered in the international mainstream media so far, of a new tailings-related landslide in Hungary yesterday.  The only English report that I have seen so far is on the Chinese CriEnglish website, which reports that 700,000 cubic metres of bauxite ore formed a flow that struck three villages in Veszprem county.  These villages appear to be Devecser, Somlóvásárhely and Kolontar.  The Google Earth imagery of this area shows the origin if the accident …

A couple of weeks ago the University of Alberta hosted a conference entitled “Tailings and Mine Waste 2009“. Impressively, all of the presentations from the meeting have been posted online on an FTP site here. Most of the presentations focus upon technical aspects of tailings facility design, but there is a very interesting talk from Michael Davis and Todd Martin from AMEC online as a pdf here. This presentation examines …