Highlights:
- A burst pipe at the Kara Mine allowed mine tailings to discharge into the Park River
- Register for Decipher’s FREE webinar, Church of England – Tailings: What’s Next?
Dissolved metals leaking from an open-cut mine in Tasmania’s North-West have been discharged into a river system that flows through Burnie.
“There is a low risk that the river water will have low levels of dissolved metals … and should not be used for drinking water until further notice,” the director for the Environment Protection Authority, Wes Ford said in a statement.
“This is expected to be for several days. The river will be discoloured with clay sediment as the discharge moves down Park River and will enter the Emu River, which flows through Burnie to Bass Strait.”
EPA officers were on site Saturday working with representatives from the mine operator collecting water samples.
The EPA said the discharge relates to a failure of a pipe transferring mine tailings to the tailings settlement dam.
“Work has been undertaken to repair the pipe today and the discharge has ceased,” it said.
The EPA will continue to investigate the incident.
Decipher is hosting a webinar, Church of England – Tailings: What’s Next?
- The Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative (insights, key findings, what’s coming, and how to prepare for the next round of questions
- The upcoming global tailings standards
- Best practices and recommendations
- Available reporting and monitoring tools
Register for this FREE webinar
FAQ:
What is the Investor Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative?
Following the recent tailings dam failures, The Investor Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative was established by a group of institutional investors active in the extractive industries representing more than $13.1 trillion in assets under management. Governed through a Steering Committee chaired by the Church of England Pensions Board and the Swedish Council of Ethics of the AP Funds, the group has called upon 727 extractive mining companies to disclose information in relation to their tailings storage facilities to form an online database.
How many companies have disclosed information about their TSFs?
As of the 20th of December 2019, 46 per cent of companies contacted responded to the request. 40 of the top 50 mining companies have made disclosures which has resulted in information about thousands of individual tailings dams being made public on company websites. All 23 of 23 publicly owned companies that are members of the International Council on Mining & Metals (ICMM) responded and fully disclosed information about their TSFs.
How many tailings dams have had stability issues?
Company disclosures to investors have revealed that 10% (166 out of 1,635) of the tailings dams reported to have had stability issues in their history.
What tailings reporting and monitoring tools are available?
Using Decipher, you can start to organise and store your tailings storage facility data in the one place, making it easier to prepare for the next round of Church of England reports:
– Easily visualise all of your sites and simply click on the dams to see all of the relevant data and reports
– Reduce confusion, human error, and inefficiencies in reporting by providing internal stakeholders with a central repository of data on your tailings facilities
– Access key data and information from multiple departments to take a holistic approach to your tailings reporting and monitoring
– Reduce the time spent and associated costs preparing reports by creating templates which extract relevant information in a particular format, such as the Church of England report
– Decipher is designed to be securely accessed by industry, regulators, designers and operators involved in the management of TSFs. Easily setup security access levels to ensure stakeholders only see information that is relevant to them, and apply business rules, approval layers and track changes to ensure data is correct
– A Single Sign-On (SSO) integration also ensures that users are managed more easily
- Speak to our team for a free demo of our Tailings Monitoring solution
- See how our solutions help manage industry stakeholder engagement and operator and regulator compliance requirements here
