We Need to Monitor Tailings Dams

By: Monica Yrrarazabal Grados

Imagine you live in a rural area, a space free of air, water, soil, and noise pollution. Suddenly, a mining company settles near to your peaceful home and after a while, it leaves behind a muddy landscape, an earth-filled embankment that stores sand, chemical reagents, rocks, water, among others. In other words, it stores mining waste that threatens every day to poison the soils and waterways. That is a tailings dam.

In the past years, tailings dams around the world have been collapsing. Just to mention some of the most dramatic examples, we can find in Brazil, Brumadinho, an upstream dam that held residue from iron ore production and failed in January 2019, wiping out everything in its way, polluting rivers, destroying forests, and killing at least 259 people.

In August 2014 a four square kilometer-sized tailings pond full of toxic copper and gold mining waste breached, spilling contaminated materials into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek, and Quesnel Lake, a source of drinking water and major spawning grounds for sockeye salmon. While the Mount Polley dam failure did not result in any fatalities -as in Brumadinho- it affected nearby communities, by infecting the lakes and rivers impacted by the release of 24 million cubic metres of contaminated mining waste.

Such is the urgency to monitor tailings dams that the Government of Peru - through the Ministry of Energy and Mines - has been working with members of the Columbia University School of International Public Affairs to understand the problem and try to work in some advice to prevent potential dam failures and, more important, its consequences for human life, economic loss and irreversible environmental loss in Peru.

In this sense, it is crucial that countries that rely on mining and have several tailings dams -like Peru- review their legislations in order to strengthen obligations regarding the design, construction, monitoring and supervision of tailings dams. In order to avoid another catastrophe as in Brumadinho, where, citing Mr. João Vitor Xavier "they knew that this could happen, I'd been saying it for years, they knew people could die but they prioritized profits."