{"id":30557,"date":"2019-03-25T07:25:01","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T07:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=30557"},"modified":"2019-03-25T07:25:01","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T07:25:01","slug":"sul-superior-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2019\/03\/25\/sul-superior-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Sul Superior: another Vale tailings dam at risk of imminent collapse in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sul Superior: another Vale tailings dam at risk of imminent collapse in Brazil<\/h4>\n

The Brazilian mining company Vale warned over the weekend that its Sul Superior tailings dam, at the Gongo Soco mine near to Bar\u00e3o de Cocais, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, is at risk of imminent collapse<\/a>.\u00a0 This dam had been the focus of concern over the last two months, with evacuations from the path of a potential tailings flow starting on 8th February 2019.\u00a0 However, on Friday Vale raised the alert level to 3, the highest classification.\u00a0 The Guardian reports<\/a> that, according to Brazil\u2019s mining and energy secretary, level three means that \u201ca rupture is imminent or already happening\u201d. It also carries a quote from Lt Col Flavio Godinho, a member of the state civil defence department, that \u201cany activity at the dam could trigger a rupture”.<\/p>\n

Back in February, portaldasgerais.com.br posted this image<\/a> of the Sul Superior dam:-<\/p>\n

\"Sul

The Sul Superior dam at the Gongo Seco mine in Brazil. Image via: portaldasgerais.com.br<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Indications are that this dam is in the order of 85 metres high, containing a volume of tailings in the range of 3 to 6 million cubic metres.\u00a0 Fortunately, this is somewhat less than was the case at Brumadinho<\/a>, but is still sufficient to cause enormous environmental damage.<\/p>\n

This appears to be the site on Google Earth – the location is -19.972, -43.598:-<\/p>\n

\"Sul

Google Earth imagery of the Sul Superior tailings dam in Brazil, which is now considered to be at risk of imminent collapse.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

There is a very interesting paper available online from the Colombia Water Center<\/a> (NB PDF), which proposes a hazard assessment methodology for tailings dams<\/a>, and uses a selection of large facilities in Minas Gerais as an example.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Sul Superior Dam generated a hazard assessment that is 17th out of a list of 28 facilities.It appears that the Brumadinho dam, which is sometimes technically known as Barragem I, ranked 7th on the list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brazilian mining company Vale warned on Friday that the Sul Superior tailings dam, at the Gongo Soco mine in Minas Gerais, is at risk of imminent collapse <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":30562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6298],"tags":[102,71,469,205,122,230],"class_list":["post-30557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tailings","tag-brazil","tag-dam","tag-featured","tag-mining","tag-south-america","tag-tailings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}