Tailings storage facilities (TSFs) are great achievements of civil engineering and have tested some of the best brains in the mining sector. Now, despite current headwinds related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry is planning to raise the bar even further by advancing its best practice in a concerted fashion over the next decade.
According to Adriaan Meintjes, partner and principal civil geotechnical engineer at SRK Consulting, the impetus for this has been a series of TSF accidents in the past few years. The most recent and dramatic was the failure of the TSF at Vale's Corrego do Feijao iron ore mine in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The event, which took place on 25 January 2019, killed over 250 people.
