The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
At about 8 pm on 13 June 2024, a failure occurred in the embankment wall of the Chinchorro tailings storage facility, close to the village of Peñablanca, near the town of Cabildo in the Valparaíso region of Chile. There is a comprehensive article about this failure (in Spanish) on the biobiochile website, and Lindsay Newland of WMTF has a piece online about the failure too. WMTF has graded this event as being “serious”.
The location of this failure is at [-32.4679, -71.0898]. This is a Google Earth image of the site, with the TSF highlighted:-
Chile Ambientale has tweeted an image of the aftermath of the failure:-
Whilst the biobiochile article has more images and an aerial video of the site.
Reports indicate that the failure occurred during the passage of a frontal weather system that deposited about 100 mm of rainfall in the area. The failure in the TSF wall is substantial, but fortunately the impact has been quite limited because the tailings had been thickened, It appears from the images that there has been very limited mobility of the tailings themselves.
SMA in Chile, which is the agency that has responsibility for enforcing environmental standards, has taken measures against the mining company responsible for the the Chinchorro TSF. It notes that failure occurred as a consequence of overtopping, which then caused the tailings dam wall to erode. The order that SMA has issued is as follows:-
“[T]he owner that must consider the measures to be implemented and their execution deadlines, which must be sent to the SMA within 24 hours; In addition, activities must be carried out to repair the slope of the confinement wall affected by rainfall, with a maximum period of 15 days.
“The third measure consists of carrying out cleaning activities for the tailings deposited in the water courses caused by the incident. In addition, surface water quality monitoring must be carried out at monitoring points in the El Maqui stream, Rincón del Chinchorro stream and La Ligua River.”
The Chinchorro TSF is not an old structure – Google Earth images show that the early stages of its construction were in 2012. The treatment of the tailings has prevented a flow failure and thus a major pollution incident in this case, but once again the unacceptable rate of failure of tailings storage facilities has come to the fore.
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