Copyright © 2013 Oboni Riskope Associates Inc.
Hosted and powered by WR London.
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…
Read MoreRiskope 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…
Read MoreTailings 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…
Read MoreSLM 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…
Read MoreMany clients are dealing with a conundrum at the cross between codes, resilience and climate change. Solving it is paramount for tactical and strategic planning purposes. Code compliance is not synonymous with resilience When facing good-old hazards that are becoming more frequent and more intense, perhaps due to climate change, it is easy to realize that code compliance becomes meaningless. Indeed, codes work for the “good old way”, both in terms of resilience and frequency. A code compliant solution may…
Read MoreWe have discussed credible events and black swans several times in this blog, but this time it is different. We do have a real black swan event and we can show it is incredible! 31st December 2019 to end of February I can still recall champagne popping on December 31st 2019. Everyone was merry, the expectations for an incredible 2020, a bissextile year on top of that, were flamboyant. Yes, pun intended. Flying to Italy from Brazil on January 23rd …
Read MoreToday 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…
Read MoreWe 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…
Read More