Body tailings are the waste materials created as part of the mining and refining process and they are stored in large embankments – tailings storage facilities.
TSFs are some of the world’s biggest engineering structures, and one of the greatest risks for mine owners, and the communities and environments in which they operate, is the far-reaching damage that occurs if they fail.
February marked the two-year anniversary of one of the most significant tailings dam failures in history – the Córrego do Feijão operation in Brumadinho, Brazil which took 270 people’s lives.
Decipher has put together a free, comprehensive guide that looks at the major tailings dam failures globally over the past 20 years, with failures in:
- Australia
- Brazil
- China
- Peru
- Mexico
- Philippines
- And many more…
You can download the free guide here.
Using tailings insights to support safer TSF management
The Brumadinho tailings disaster triggered an unprecedented overhaul of global safety regulations leading to the introduction, in mid-2020, of the world’s first global safety standards for tailings management.
Resources companies are now required to be more transparent in their disclosure of tailings risk and insurers have been quick to line-up behind the new standards making insurance cover difficult to secure unless miners can demonstrate standards compliance.
Decipher (part of the K2fly suite) has created a tailings governance and monitoring software solution to support industry best practice and help companies meet new tailings compliance requirements, including the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management.
The solution is trusted by Environmental, Tailings, Geotechnical and Management teams globally, and is providing the tools to help companies make decisions towards improving compliance, minimising risk and securing insurance cover.
The cloud-based solution combines regulatory compliance management, mining waste management, stakeholder engagement, environmental monitoring, and environmental management into a single feature-rich package, with secure global access, to industry, regulators, designers, and allowing operators to share data and monitor facilities from anywhere in the world, at any time.
The integrated system brings together a comprehensive suite of tools, including geo-spatial feeds such as earth observations, InSAR, landform, erosion tracking, and weather conditions, overlayed with mapping and blast data, environmental monitoring and sample results, and stakeholder details.
It offers company managers, technical specialists and operating staff around the world three levels of interrogation and the records they need for accurate, timely tailings disclosure with external analysts and regulators. The levels include:
- Macro – a lightweight database of key data for each TSF including actions, stakeholders and compliance.
- Monitoring – an overview of asset condition and status including Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), chemistry, satellite imagery, water quality and quantity.
- Micro – detailed data from LiDAR, radar and IoT devices (monitoring piezometers, inclinometers, seismometers etc.)
This makes it possible for them to visualise facilities across multiple sites and quickly identify, assess and minimize failure risk for its TSF assets, while streamlining tailings disclosure and reporting across the company’s big asset inventory.
On the alert for tailings risk
Subtle changes in ground movement are often the first indicator that a TSF is vulnerable.
Most TSFs fail because of factors such as foundation weakening, seepage, overtopping and earthquake damage, but ground movement can be difficult to track using conventional methods, particularly when you are dealing with large, complex structures that can have walls over 25 metres high and more than five kilometres long.
Decipher puts these factors under the microscope, tracking minor changes in key variables and sending immediate safety alerts when conditions vary from pre-defined safety parameters.
Changes in soil and physical attributes, such as surface and groundwater, decant pond water levels and quality, and embankment conditions, are tracked using data from devices such as piezometers and monitoring bores, or via water levels and vibration.
Land subsidence and movement is detected using remote sensing, such as satellite derived InSAR datasets. This can be visualised in real-time using LiDAR data and combined with specific insights into dam movement using hardware and data from providers such as GlassTerra.
Combining a rich mix of integrated data to pinpoint subtle changes in condition and landform, is one ways our system promotes safety and reduces TSF failure risk. Users receive an alert when changes are detected, can view a graphic analysis on the dashboard, and then drill down into the different tools to extract more detailed information.
To learn more about Decipher or their TSF Monitoring and Governance solution, click here.