The 4th International Symposium on Mine Safety Science and Engineering (ISMSSE2018)

358 / 2018-05-30 17:44:56

Study on the consequences of dam break of tailings and analysis of its causes

Tailings pond; Dam Break; Risk assessment; Accident tree

Mine Dynamics Disaster > tailings pond

Tailings ponds are a huge source of high potential energy, and there is a dam-breaking risk. Once a dam breaks out, it is easy to cause major or extraordinary accidents, which poses a serious threat to the safety of downstream residents and facilities. At the same time, dam breaches cause the overflow of various heavy metal minerals and toxic substances contained in the tailings, which will seriously pollute the ecological environment surrounding the tailings reservoir and the downstream. Firstly, the paper uses the evaluation function of the severity of tailing dam’ s dam breach, and evaluates the severity of a tailings dam's dam failure by four factors: scale of tailings reservoir, loss of life, social environmental impact, and economic loss; Secondly, based on the qualitative analysis of the accident tree based on the cause of the dam breach, the main factors for dam collapse are the instability of the dam body and flood tops; finally, the dam breach prevention measures are proposed for the tailing pond. This paper takes a tailings deposit in Yunnan as an example to analyze the impact of the reservoir dam breakage on the downstream.