Natural Resources Extraction: Stressors and Impact Management - Sustainable Practices in Geoenvironmental Engineering - page 153

a whole series of cases of dam or heap failures associated with industries extracting prod-
ucts such as copper, nickel, manganese, luorite, bauxite, gold, phosphate, etc., ranging
from 1960 to 2012. By and large, the major stressors responsible for the slope failures and
various other types of instability are (a) excessive forces or stresses in the structures (heaps
and tailing dams) due to size and weight of the heap—inconsistent with the design stabil-
ity of the structures, and (b) excess porewater pressures developed as a result of iniltrat-
ing rainwater or other sources—due to the lack of provision for slope protection facilities
against iniltration and/or drainage system and pore-pressure shedding devices within
the structures. Other examples of failures of tailings dams and their consequences can be
seen in Table 5.2.
Chemical and biogeochemical stressors originating from heap and tailing dam sources
can be traced to the nature of the host ores and the leaching solutions used to extract the

TABLE 5.2
Examples of Failures of Tailings Dams

Tailings Dams Failures

Name Effects Cause and Trigger Countries Date

Osarizawa mine 374 deaths from failure of the

60-m-high tailing dam

Increase in the height
of the tailings dam
due to excess copper
production and
heavy rainfall

Akita,
Japan

November
20, 1936

Mochikoshi mine Cyanide compound lowed out

into the Kano River

Failure of the tailings
dam caused by the
Izu-Oshima Kinkai
earthquake

Shizuoka,
Japan

January 14,
1978

Church Reck
tailings dam

Failure of uranium tailing dam,
contaminating the Navajo
Nation reservation and the
Corolado River, ending in
contaminating parts of
Arizona and Nevada

Unidentiied failure New

Mexico,
USA

July 19, 1979

Baia Mare tailing
dam

Cyanide spill (leakage) near
Baia Mare, Romania, into the
Someş River by a gold mining
company has been called the
worst environmental disaster
in Europe since the Chernobyl
disaster

Dam failure
attributed to
excessive snowfall

Romania January 30,

2000

MAL Magyar
Alumínium
Termelő és
Kereskedelmi Zrt.
(aluminum
smelting factory)

69,700 kL of highly alkaline
red-mud waste containing
heavy metals lowed out and
contaminated the surrounding
land and river, with 9 dead
and more than 120 injured

Failure of the tailings
dam not fully
identiied

Hungary October 10,

2010

Oya mine 40,000 m 3 of soils including

arsenic lowed out and
contaminated the land
and port

Failure of the tailing
dam caused by the
2011 earthquake off
the Paciic coast of
Tōhoku

Miyagi,
Japan

March 11,
2011