Mining Tailings Dams Go Digital For Added Safety

Another four were confirmed missing with 40 others being taken to hospital. The destruction to housing and other infrastructure in the affected community was in the tens of millions of rands.

According to Alastair Bovim, CEO of tailings monitoring and analytics platform Insight Terra , tragedies like the one in Jagersfontein are preventable. Technological advances have given mining engineers the ability to monitor tailings dams - which contain vast volumes of mining waste sludge - in real time.

When engineers have insight into a dam's inner movements, composition and the level of risk posed by external events such as heavy rains or even earthquakes, pre-emptive action can be taken.

"Tailings waste is an outcome of the mining process and, depending on the type of metal being mined, the waste typically has to be stored and managed," Bovim told TechCentral in a recent interview. "Sometimes it is dry tailings, so heaps of rocks, but where the risk lies is with wet tailings."

Bovim explained that a tailings dam is like a living organism that grows as more sludge is added to it. The wall of the dam is expanded every six months to a year. The gunk at the bottom of the dam tends to condense and harden, while the top contains more water and is sludgier, he said.