Chapter 4
Historic Failures “Statistics”
4.1 A Hundred Years of Tailings Dams Lesson Learned
This chapter looks at one hundred years of tailings dams major failures “statistics”
and shows how a systemic approach can be used to describe failure process of tailings
dams.
Past and future probabilistic quantitative failure behaviour of tailings dams has
been studied and published respectively in 2013, 2014 and 2015 at the Tailings and
Mine Waste conferences (Oboni and Oboni 2013; Oboni et al. 2014; Caldwell et al.
2015). The aim was to provide quantitative measures to the predictive performances
and various mitigation measures and levels of hazards/risk of tailings dams. In this
section we summarize the findings of those papers.
At the conference Tailings and Mine Waste (TMW) 2013 (Oboni and Oboni
2013) we attempted the first estimate of the rate of failure of major tailings dams and
compared their risks to human life to well-known societal tolerance. After stating the
limitations of the available data and the lack of a clear definition of what constituted a
major failure in commonly available statistics, we found rates varying between 10
−3
(the decade around 1979) to 2 × 10
−4 (the decade around 1999) major failures per
dam year as shown in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Approximate pf of tailings dams based on preliminary sets of historic data (Oboni and
Oboni 2013)
Where
When (decade)
p f
Approx p f
World-wide
Around 1997
44/(3500 × 10)
10 −3
World-wide
Around 1999
7/35,000
2 × 10 −4
US
Around 1979 and Around 1999 7 or 8/(1000 × 10) 7 or 8 × 10 −4
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
F. Oboni and C. Oboni, Tailings Dam Management for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19447-5_4
35
Historic Failures “Statistics”
4.1 A Hundred Years of Tailings Dams Lesson Learned
This chapter looks at one hundred years of tailings dams major failures “statistics”
and shows how a systemic approach can be used to describe failure process of tailings
dams.
Past and future probabilistic quantitative failure behaviour of tailings dams has
been studied and published respectively in 2013, 2014 and 2015 at the Tailings and
Mine Waste conferences (Oboni and Oboni 2013; Oboni et al. 2014; Caldwell et al.
2015). The aim was to provide quantitative measures to the predictive performances
and various mitigation measures and levels of hazards/risk of tailings dams. In this
section we summarize the findings of those papers.
At the conference Tailings and Mine Waste (TMW) 2013 (Oboni and Oboni
2013) we attempted the first estimate of the rate of failure of major tailings dams and
compared their risks to human life to well-known societal tolerance. After stating the
limitations of the available data and the lack of a clear definition of what constituted a
major failure in commonly available statistics, we found rates varying between 10
−3
(the decade around 1979) to 2 × 10
−4 (the decade around 1999) major failures per
dam year as shown in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Approximate pf of tailings dams based on preliminary sets of historic data (Oboni and
Oboni 2013)
Where
When (decade)
p f
Approx p f
World-wide
Around 1997
44/(3500 × 10)
10 −3
World-wide
Around 1999
7/35,000
2 × 10 −4
US
Around 1979 and Around 1999 7 or 8/(1000 × 10) 7 or 8 × 10 −4
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
F. Oboni and C. Oboni, Tailings Dam Management for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19447-5_4
35