/vale-drills-caused-brumadinho-dam-collapse-police-say/ No 1 source of global mining news and opinion Tue, 02 Mar 2021 13:33:27 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 /vale-drills-caused-brumadinho-dam-collapse-police-say/#comment-228553 Tue, 02 Mar 2021 13:33:27 +0000 /?p=1050099#comment-228553 I once had a tailings dam start to fail on me at the Premier Gold Mine (a long time ago). It was an upstream built dam, which naturally is prone to failure from a design point of view. Any injection of fluids into a earth dam, or even pipe breaks, will cause a dam to fail very quickly…it can happen with hours. if the dam was built with the upstream method, that type of dam was never meant to retain water behind it, as opposed to more expensive centreline dams, which are less prone to failure. How did I fix the potential dam failure temporarily? I moved spigotting operations next to the dam face, to roll back water away from the face of the dam, thus saving the dam for that period of time (water pressure and movement was moved from the face of the dam). Then I dewatered the dam fairly rapidly, knowing I had a well established beach along the inner face of the dam from spigotting operations.

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