Catastrophic tailings dam failures and disaster risk disclosure

Floods from tailings dam failures.

This paper compiles the available information on historic tailings dam failures with the purpose to establish simple correlations between tailings ponds geometric parameters (e.g., dam height, tailings volume) and the hydraulic characteristics of floods resulting from released tailings. Following the collapse of a mining waste dam, only a part of tailings and polluted water stored at the dam is...

Reported tailings dam failures. A review of the European incidents in the worldwide context.

A detailed search and re-evaluation of the known historical cases of tailings dam failure was carried out. A corpus of 147 cases of worldwide tailings dam disasters, from which 26 located in Europe, was compiled in a database. This contains six sections, including dam location, its physical and constructive characteristics, actual and putative failure cause, sludge hydrodynamics, socio-economic...

Diversion of Water from a Tailings Dam

Risk assessment of catastrophic failures in electric power systems

The declining reliability of the US electric power system is raising major concerns amongst both politicians and power engineers in the USA. One of the reasons put forward by the North Electric Reliability Council (NERC) is the detrimental role played by the protection systems during large disturbances, which tend to help the perturbations to propagate through over-tripping of fault free system...

Catastrophic failures of public health.

Sir—The arresting title of your Editorial (Mar 6, p 745) certainly caught my attention. It compares the “old” epidemics of infectious diseases (and the allegedly successful publichealth response to them) with the new epidemic of obesity, and the apparently complacent public-health response to it. But is it a true picture, both of the past and the present? The public-health “greats” (Semmelweiss...