Tailings Dams: A Disaster Waiting to Happen

This year's project progresses previous Capstone work on sustainable mining practices in Peru. As such, this report focused on tailings dams - and often overlooked danger in the mining industry. Tailings dams are wastewater retention ponds associated with mining activities. Hundreds of thousands of these long-term storage facilities exist worldwide, many without proper management and monitoring plans. Even as hundreds of lives are lost, public health in major cities is threatened, and critical ecosystems are destroyed, the maintenance of these dams remains overlooked. The recommendations provided to the client tie the socioeconomic implications of dam failure to technical considerations for how they can be improved. The project team met with a wide variety of stakeholders to understand tailings dams in the context of how water management is addressed in the Mining Vision 2030, in community consultations and through technical working groups. This report is complementary to the work already underway by RIMAY, the arm of MINEM responsible for the implementation of the Vision. Several key case studies of global dam failures mentioned in the report provide a foundation for legal recommendations for regulatory measures that hold parties accountable and ensure proper long-term management.