You are browsing the archive for Tag: tailings - Page 6 - The Landslide Blog.
29 July 2011
China has suffered another tailings dam failure
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 …
19 December 2010
The outcome of a study of the Kolontar Tailings Dam failure
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 …
11 October 2010
Images of the top surface of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar / Kolontar tailings dam
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 …
10 October 2010
Further insights into the failure mode of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar (Kolontar) tailings dam
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: …
9 October 2010
New aerial images of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar tailings dam site
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 …
7 October 2010
The Ajkai Timfoldgyar tailings dam disaster: Lessons from the Los Frailes tailings dam failure in Spain
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 …
18 November 2009
Tailings dam failures and the price of commodities
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 …
16 September 2008
Loss of life in the China and Egypt landslidesp
Just a brief update on the latest estimate of the loss of life in the landslides last week in Egypt and China: Taoshi (Shanxi): as of 16th September the official death toll is 259 people. Searches continue (see above AFP image).Manshiet Nasser (Cairo): as of 16th September the official death toll is 92 people. It appears that recovery actions have now ceased as the site is considered to be too …
14 September 2008
Loss of life in the Manshiet Nasser (Cairo) and Taoshi township (Shaanxi) landslides
Xinhua is now reporting that the death toll in the Shaanxi landslide has now reached 254. They also report that the recovery teams are yet to search two channels in which local people believe more bodies are buried AFP is reporting that the number of fatalities in the Manshiet Nasser (Cairo) landslide is now 82 people, with at least another week of recovery work to follow. Interestingly. they also report …
11 September 2008
Updates on the Cairo and Shaanxi landslides
It is unusual to have two major stories running simultaneously about landslides so here is a combined update: 1. The Manshiet Nasser landslide in Cairo The death toll in the Cairo landslide disaster continues to rise – it is now officially 69 people. There seems to be considerable confusion about how many people are left trapped – but is fair to say that there is now no hope of rescuing …
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.
Recent Comments