At the CIM Tailings Workshop Series pre-workshop, participants were asked three questions to encourage the discussion.
Below are the three questions and our replies.
What is a Tailings System?
From a physical point of view, not in order of importance:
- start at the pumps in the mill
- pipelines, spigots
- dams
- all water management ancillary facilities
- roadway at the crown
- seepage collection facilities
- decant raft and pipes
- monitoring
- investigations and testing
- design and construction
From a management point of view:
- documentation
- decision-making processes
- chain of command
From a cyber point of view:
- IoT
- remote monitoring
- telecommunications
- cybersecurity
What are the Hazards and Risks in a Tailings System?
Hazards are present in a system since inception of design and include factors such as:
- lack of effort and imagination
- oversimplification of geological and hydrogeological factors
- seismic conditions
- climate
- epidemic (preventing patrolling and monitoring, for example)
- ecoterrorism
- cyberthreats
We do not prepare a list of risks beforehand because that is not possible if the consequences are not defined.
What are Failure Modes and Causes?
Failure modes describe how a dam could fail, but they neither describe why it fails nor how the intricacies of the system contribute to the failure. By boxing studies with failure modes, people miss important interdependencies that may exist within the system and outside the system (with another dam, for example). Failure modes may be useful to designers, but it is time to change the approach to risk assessment.
