A tailings dam for mining byproduct storage sits in a quarry at the Northam Platinum Ltd. Booysendal platinum mine outside the town of Lydenburg in Mpumalanga, South Africa, on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018. Booysendal will use a system developed by an Austrian company that builds ski lifts to transport the ore up a 30 degree incline out of a valley for processing, instead of the traditional conveyer used throughout South Africa or the more expensive option of trucking. Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Police reservist Brian Emmenis was watching Dallas with his wife on the evening of 22 February 1994 when the phone rang. It was his colleague, Captain Ben van Wyk, who told Emmenis to grab his emergency kit because a dam had broken.
Both men believed that heavy rains had broken the Allemanskraal Dam, which is upriver from Virginia in the Free State. But it was Harmony Gold’s tailings dam that had failed, flooding neighbouring residential areas in Merriespruit.
Emmenis, who is now the station manager for Gold FM, was among the first police officers on the scene. “At that moment, it was a nightmare from hell because the mud was gushing out,” he recalled. “Houses were crumbling. It was like a scene from a very, very bad movie.”
As part of the airborne rescue team, he remembers the faces of “anguish” of residents stranded on the top of their roofs. “On many occasions as we lifted the person, the whole house washed away … we saved 22 lives on those roofs.”
Tailings disasters increasing in frequency and severity
Merriespruit was South Africa’s worst dam tailings disaster — 17 people were killed and 80 houses destroyed — but such events are rare, according to Mariette Liefferink, the chief executive of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment.
But, since 2015, research of all serious failures of tailing storage facilities (TSF) around the world has shown that the rate of failures is rising. There are at least 18 000 of these mine waste disposal facilities globally. They contain the processed waste materials generated from mining metals and minerals in slurry.
Liefferink pointed out that half of the 67 serious TSF failures in the past 70 years occurred between 1990 and 2009. These include the deadly tide of toxic red sludge from a bauxite mine in Kolontar, Hungary, that partially submerged villages in 2010; the collapse of a TSF in 2014 at the Mount Polley mine in Canada that sent 17 million cubic metres of water and eight million cubic metres of hazardous material gushing into waterways; a tailings landslide from an aluminium refinery in Luoyang, China, in 2016 and the Merriespruit disaster.
In 2019, near Brumadinho in Brazil, a tailings dam collapse from the Vale iron ore mine killed 272 people, destroying houses and buildings for kilometres before flowing into the Paraopeba River. In December 2021, a coal slurry dam at the Zululand Anthracite Colliery (ZAC) collapsed in northern KwaZulu-Natal, spilling at least 1.5 million litres of coal slurry into the uMfolozi River system.
‘Catastrophic’ failures
According to Liefferink, 19 “catastrophic failures” are predicted globally from 2018 to 2027.
“The increasing rate of TSF failures is propelled by, not in spite of, modern mining practices …[and] directly related to the increasing number of TSFs larger than five million cubic metres capacity, necessitated to allow for the economic extraction of lower grades of ore.”
Shortly after the Brumadinho disaster, a call to industry was issued, supported by investors with $1-trillion assets under management. “This outlined the need for an industry-wide response to the problem of TSFs and called attention to environmental, social, and corporate governance [ESG] risks.”
The Investor Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative subsequently wrote to the mining industry, asking hundreds of mining companies, including several in South Africa, to publicly support and adopt the 2020 global industry standard on tailings management.
Industry standards, regulation lacking
At present, industry standards and governmental regulations still do not go far enough to adequately protect [ep[;e and ecosystems from failures, according to a new report by nonprofits Earthworks, MiningWatch Canada and the London Mining Network. The design, construction, operation and closure of tailings facilities require significant changes to protect people and the environment, the groups maintain.
“The Brumadinho catastrophe stunned the world but should not have come as a surprise … Tailings facilities are failing with increasing frequency and severity,” said the report.
“As climate change brings increasingly severe and extreme weather conditions, and the transition to renewable energy increases demand for certain minerals, addressing the problems of mine tailings management is more urgent than ever,” Jan Morrill, Earthworks’ tailings campaign manager, said in a statement. “We must prioritise safety over cost.”
Their updated set of guidelines for improving the management of mine waste disposal facilities includes making safety the guiding principle in design, construction, operation and closure; an expanded definition of consent as an ongoing process that starts before exploration and the explicit right for an affected community to reject a project; enhanced protections for ecological resources in the “zero harm” framework; increased transparency in tailings regulation and clarification of a company’s responsibility to ensure the safe closure of a facilities.
Mining waste in South Africa
Liefferink said that although many of these facilities are safe in South Africa and governance and oversight is often adequate, gaps remain.
Waste from gold mines constitutes the largest single source of waste and pollution in South Africa, according to the Mine Tailings Working Group of South Africa, a partnership of civil society groups, which includes Liefferink’s federation. “At the Witwatersrand gold fields, more than 120 mines have extracted over 116 00 tons of gold and uranium, leaving a legacy of more than 270 tailings facilities that cover approximately 400km². Contamination, including air, water and soil pollution, have significant health impacts on surrounding communities, many of which are composed of low-income homes.”
Current laws and regulations are not preventing or mitigating the detrimental effects of tailings dams, particularly unsafe and abandoned facilities. These shortcomings include inadequate regulations for mine closure and dust emissions; insufficient buffer zones between tailings facilities and residential areas, poor control and maintenance of abandoned tailings dams and misclassification of the re-processing of residual gold and other metals from historic tailings facilities and residue stockpiles.
“The government must introduce regulatory reforms that will ensure effective transparency and monitoring of tailings facilities,” said Hassen Lorgat, of the Bench Marks Foundation and a convenor of the working group. Lorgat said effective tailings management is impossible without civil society oversight as well as the role of independent professionals.
Rights for affected communities
He said the working group would use the report to help get “rights for mining communities who do not have the right to sit and determine where tailings are built and how they’re built” in South Africa.
“We’re hoping to use this document to create greater awareness because it’s an impact on people’s lives … What happened in uMfolozi and those areas where ZAC dams collapsed on 24 December 2021 is a sign of things to come. If these things are poorly constructed with inferior materials, clearly more floods [will happen], not just of clean rainwater, as powerful and devastating as that is, but of sludge and other poisons that may destroy lives.”
The department of mineral resources and energy did not respond to the Mail & Guardian while the Minerals Council South Africa declined to comment on the Earthworks report.
Robert Krause, a researcher in the environmental justice programme at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, said: “Pollution due to poorly managed and designed tailings facilities remains a key example of systemic violation of communities’ environmental health rights, water access rights and dignity. Lack of access to information and technical experts are barriers to communities seeking to prevent environmental rights violations and proving violations where they occur.
“The Safety First [report’s] guidelines, which include (to cite a few examples), design of dams to avoid loss of life, a requirement of community consent for any new tailings, access to information in communities’ home languages and offering communities access to technical experts, constitute the minimum conditions for ending this widespread pattern of rights violations.”
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