Development of a method to assess the susceptibility of tailings dams' failure due to overtopping
Résumé
In the last 20 years, more than 40 major tailing dam accidents occurred posing major economic, social and environmental threats like for instance, the dam failures of Baia Mare in Romania (2000), Mariana in Brazil (2015) and again in Brazil with the recent Brumadinho dam failure (2019). There are several existing methods to monitor the safety and efficiency of tailing dams, such as field measures, numerical and physical models, monitoring and expert judgment from referred professionals. However, these methods are very time, labour and money consuming. The purpose of this article is to propose a method to assess the susceptibility of failure of a tailings dam due to overtopping which: i) depends on qualitative and quantitative input variables ii) is adapted to the available amount of information and iii) gives a relevant confidence level. This methodology will be practical for preliminary evaluation of the state of a tailings dam and to point out the necessity of future study for the structure's safety.