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The impact of standard of care on dams survivability

Using ORE2_Tailings we can quantify the impact of standard of care on dams survivability. In this blogpost we take three dams, namely Dam x, Dam y and Dam z. Their design was identical with initial factor of safety of 1.3. In addition, they had similar QA/QC, construction method, same systemic approach, efforts and uncertainties consideration. Various small mishaps hit the dams along their history. Some repairs occurred, under different contracts, different quality control and finally, at different times. It turns…

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Tailings dams failures insurance perspective

It is interesting to read about Tailings dams failures insurance perspective. Riskope helped solving miners’ insurance denial issues for the last 15 years. Riskope also recognizes the issue is becoming much wider than mining due, for example to climate change impacting residential and private parties. Tailings dams Recent papers from Willis Towers Watson  quote tailings dams failures frequency at two failure per year. In a 2013 paper (Oboni, C., Oboni F., Factual and Foreseeable Reliability of Tailings Dams and Nuclear Reactors -a…

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Quantitative Convergent ERM to Solve Real Life Problem

Riskope presented at Infonex (https://infonex.com/ ) Quantitative Convergent ERM to Solve Real Life Problem. The conference was carried out on Zoom and the talks were, of course recorded. What is ERM?  Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a plan-based decision-making support. It allows its users to enhance their tactical and strategic planning and therefore to increase competitiveness. Indeed, it aims to identify, assess, and prepare a project, corporation to cope with threats and hazards. Threats and hazards can occur with different…

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Tailings dams knowledge base creation

Tailings dams knowledge base creation is about how to acquire the information needed to perform well documented risk assessments. Of course, there are many possible ways to create the necessary knowledge-base for a risk assessment that is compliant with the new Global standard. Today we will discuss a few possible ways to do so at a high-level.At Riskope we passionately believe that only a blending of these approaches is capable of bringing the answers needed for high quality risk assessments…

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Dams Failure modes and catastrophic failures

Today we explore the relationship between Failure modes and catastrophic failures. Catastrophic failure of tailings dam and its water management structures are the likely result of the failure of a number of essential components or any combination of states. We purposely use a different terminology from failure modes because they explain how the dam can fail, but not why. If we look at past events, hydro dams and tailings dam are similar as, for example Oroville and Fundao did fail…

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Dam portfolio risks—a few definitions

Dam portfolio risks—a few definitions aims to bring clarity on terms definitions that oftentimes remain shrouded in mystery. Risk Framework Risk analysis frameworks provide a methodological basis for establishing a transparent and defensible evaluation of the risk generated by a given dam and/or portfolio of dams. They can be qualitative, semi-quantitative or fully quantitative. The framework is essentially a repeatable evaluation scheme which may rely on: quantification of expert judgment, subjective probabilities, empirical/statistical observations or probabilistic models (Stamatelatos et al.…

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Dam Monitoring Effects

Dam monitoring effect is a case history. A client acquired a mining properties portfolio. It included inactive dams at closed mines. Some of these structures were relatively well documented, while others were not. As a result, the client was facing important decisions, one of them being the effort to enhance the knowledge on the structures. The question the client asked was: “What happens to a particular dam if the level of knowledge we have on an inactive dam goes from…

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Tailings dams design and experience

Lately several tailings dam failures rocked the mining world. Despite the relative high frequency of these events we have heard engineers qualify the failures as “one in a million”, “extremely rare” or even “black swans”. Today we want to discuss a few concepts on tailings dams design and experience. In particular, we will focus on some disconcerting qualifiers like the ones we just cited above. For example, given the experience of tailings dams catastrophic failures  resulting from combinations of various…

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