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Tactical and strategic planning to mitigate divergent events

Tactical and strategic planning to mitigate divergent events is one of the themes of our next book. The term divergent does not yet appear in our glossary, as we are preparing its fourth edition. Stay tuned for the announcement of its publication. In short, hazards or exposures become divergent when they part from long term averages and “usual extremes”, both in terms of frequencies and/or magnitude. For example, a hundred-year rain event that occurs three times in a short interval…

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Comments on KPMG survey about third party risk management

We just read KPMG’s Third Party Risk Management outlook 2020 and today we will pitch in comments on KPMG survey on third party risk management . Risk integration We discuss what its conclusions mean in terms of practical risk assessment and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). At Riskope we started integrating third parties risks in ERMs and risk assessments twenty years ago. We note that in the grand scheme of things third party may also mean neighbors. Of course, defining the limits…

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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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SLM and the Probability of failure of a tailings dam

SLM and the probability of failure of a tailings dam goes back 35 years.  A paper entitled “Probability and Risk of Slope Failure” (Silva et al., 2008) proposed using quantification of expert judgement.  That is a subjective/semi-empirical probability evaluation as a practical alternative for determining probability of slope failure. We call this approach SLM, using the initials of the authors. SLM culminates with semi-empirical relationships between Factor of Safety -FoS- and probability of failure -pf-. That relationship allows to estimate…

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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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Strategic operational and tactical planning for tailings hydro dams

We are learning that structural integrity of hydro dams is also becoming an issue. Thus, similarly to tailings dams, we need a strategic operational and tactical planning for tailings hydro dams! Karl Terzaghi, American Society of Civil Engineers, “Terzaghi Lectures, 1974-1982,” American Society of Civil Engineers (1986) ISBN 0-87262-532-X. proposed that a dam rating system should provide ALL of the following: A logical framework for rating the relative safety of a dam Allow for the use of judgment and experience…

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Dam risks informational gap

Dam risks informational gap impacts to a certain extent all dams: hydro, tailings and finally, toxic dumps. There are thousands of active dams around the world significantly different because of: age, function, materials, construction style and care, maintenance care and finally “behavior” or performance. Oroville dam was one of those, like other recent mining catastrophes and the Michigan failures. What do all dams have in common? Dams are all exposed to hazards, e.g. natural, man-made such as excess of confidence,…

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