Riskope’s new book Tailings Dam Management for the Twenty-First Century

May 14th, 2019

Riskope’s new book Tailings Dam Management for the Twenty-First Century is in print.

Local: Distrito de Bento Rodrigues, Município de Mariana, Minas Gerais.
Foto: Rogério Alves/TV Senado

This book is based on over thirty years of world-wide consulting experience, relentless methodological research and development, prior books, courses, seminars delivered to corporate key stakeholders, public and governmental agencies, public hearings, expert witnessing in civil and criminal courts, and over fifty technical papers. Its purpose is to identify and describe risk assessment approaches and risk management practices mining must implement to develop a positive path forward. That is to reach profitable and sustainable operations that will be corporately and societally acceptable from a risk standpoint. This will simultaneously cover the interests of lenders, investors and insurers as well.

 Riskope’s new book Tailings Dam Management for the Twenty-First Century

During the book design and writing phases we kept asking ourselves who our readers would be. Beacuse the aim was to custom tailor the texts to their interests. It turns out the complexity of our modern society, and of the tailings systems and their governance, make it vain, in our minds, to focus on one single readership. Hence we have attempted to write a single book that would deliver value to various categories in the mining world and the public. To do so, we have opted for various writing devices.

First, important comments and advice to readers are inserted as pertinent. That makes it possible reading the book as a “high level” series of notes. Next, we have inserted as needed and pertinent, specific subsections entitled “Conclusions.” These contain partial summaries related to the prior sections. They include our comments and discussions. Reading through these allows a “course-summary” type of reading. That is quickly grasping results and information while skipping the details of the discussions. Finally, interested readers can read the complete book text, gaining knowledge and becoming able to reference the various discussions.

 What Mining Companies Need to Know and Do to Thrive in Our Complex World

The book is split in three parts.

PART I, State of Affairs

looks at several examples of recent catastrophic failures from a forensic analysis point of view, as they were performed by various independent panels and entities. At the end of Part I we distill the various recommendations  into one comprehensive “specs file” for the  twenty-first century.

PART II, How to Build a Twenty-First-Century Comprehensive Risk Management Program

This part starts with a basic list of “DON’Ts”. Then the tone turns positive and the text follows the logic of a real-life risk-informed decision-making approach. Indeed, each chapter corresponds to a necessary step to develop a modern risk assessment. The results lead to risk-informed decision making “from cradle to grave” of a tailings facility, or any other mining system. Finally,

PART III, Case Histories and a Look into the Future

features a risk-informed decision-making deployments example and a discussion on risk communication, and concludes with a look into what we expect might happen in the years, decades to come.

Concrete examples and case histories support the discussion.

Closing remarks

This book would not have been possible without the support of many people.

A special thank goes to Henry Brehaut who decided to cooperate to the writing with enthusiasm, after ten minutes of conversation, when we met at Tailings and Mine Waste 2017. We greatly aprreciate his research on recent accidents and management procedures in Part I of the book.

We are also grateful to our clients. For instance, because they pushed us to find new solutions for more and more complex problems. They are the ones who inspired us to break the boxes in which common practices have locked themselves in. That  triggered years and years of continuous research, development and field testing of our methodologies and procedures.

Tagged with: benchmark of tailings dams, future tailings dams, tailings

Category: Consequences, Hazard, Mitigations, Risk analysis, Risk management, Tolerance/Acceptability