Personal human experience, bounded rationality and deception of credible scenario are important in the context of risk identification. Risk identification is a fundamental phase of a risk assessment. It intervenes after system and objectives definition. Oftentimes we hear that practitioners consider only credible scenarios in a risk identification exercise. Today we explore why only considering credible scenario is a deception and could lead you to disaster. Incidentally, this might be one of the reasons leading numerous unrealistic risk assessment…
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Reliable facts about worldwide tailings dam performances are hard to come by. Emotions or politically driven approaches often lead to fake news in mining which feed media eager to sell copies. Indeed, “wannabe” comprehensive reviews of tailings dam failures oftentimes also draw conclusion that may at first feel right. However, under closer scrutiny, they are far from being realistic for a variety of reasons we will endeavor to discuss today. Counting accidents Taxonomy of accidents A reasonable approach is to…
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Recent tailings disasters such as the failure of the Mount Polley and Samarco dams have focused the attention on the Consequences of tailings dams failures. Consequences of tailings dams failures: outflow volume and runout distance Classic approaches Various classic approaches (Rico et al., 2008, Azam & Li, 2010) assume that the volume of released tailings is a function of storage volume. Dam height intervenes, particularly for the runout distance preliminary evaluation. They find “statistical correlations” using a set of dam…
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We use the dBase published by CSP for Hundred years of lessons learned in tailings dams failures. We process Data using Luna, a BI platform by Hicare that Riskope routinely links to ORE for pre- and post-processing of risk results. Hundred years of lessons learned in tailings dams failures The infographic below shows the full database of 289 tailings accidents, of any volume, any type of dam, failure mode, release volume, etc. We grouped the results by decade (horizontal axis)…
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