Regional Distribution and Causes of Global Mine Tailings Dam Failures

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...

Preventing acid mine drainage from mine tailings

Mining activity always has high impact on its surroundings, being waste deposition the cause of multiple and complex problems to the environment. One of them is Acid Mine Drainage (AMD), causing acid water percolation through large areas in the mine site. Portugal was a prosper tungsten producer from the beginning of the XX century, having its apogee during World War II. Nowadays there are mill...

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

Global and regional causes of death.

BACKGROUND Assessing the causes of death across all regions of the world requires a framework for integrating, and analysing, the fragmentary information that is available on numbers of deaths and their cause distributions. This paper provides an overview of the met and methods used by the World Health Organization to develop global-, regional- and country-level estimates of mortality for a com...