Video of March 16, 2025 Slen of Earth in Andavilque, Bolivia

The earth landslides blog It is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

The impact of the land landslides of March 16, 2025 in Andavilque, Bolivia, remains evident as the recovery operation is in full swing. News reports Suggest that there were two deaths and that 47 houses were destroyed. The government has committed to a complete investigation, but we know that such promises are often not delivered.

It seems that heavy rains may have led to an overload that quickly became a large -scale violation. There is a fascinating video of the development of YouTube failure, buried in a news report from the event.. I should be able to see this below, but keep in mind that the footage is not verified at this point:–

Hopefully the video begins at the relevant time (approximately 1 minute 58 seconds in the piece). This is a video quiet:-

The video seems to show a retroacious failure of the tailings, presumably through static liquefaction, with repeated and fast rotary events. Interestingly, the surface layers seem to retain part of their original structure, which is presumably associated with a lower moisture content. However, the videos of the tailings suggest that this structure collapsed with the movement.

The video also includes images of the aftermath: the impact of this landslide in the community, its people and their cattle is heartbreaking.

Surprisingly, As Lindsay Newland Bowker pointed outThis is the sixth main failure of 2025 tailings, an extraordinary rate. It is not clear if this is simply a statistical error or an indication of an underlying trend.

Anyway, this fault rate is unacceptable.

The mining industry and partners have established the Global Tailings Management Institute (GTMI) to “Supervise a process for independent audit and certification against the standard of the global industry on tailings management (GISTM)”. This is welcome and very delayed. It will be interesting to see if this has any impact on tailings management in places where mining regulation is lax and/or in the management of abandoned facilities. I hope it is successful.

Meanwhile, the incredible organization of Lindsay Newland Bowker, World mine tailings failuresHe continues to do an extraordinary job by documenting and analyzing these events in a bit of little. The mining industry should really invest in putting it in a stable financial base as an independent audit of the occurrence and the global pattern of these terrible events. The cost would be a loose change for the industry.

Even better would be to establish an independent function to investigate failures when they occur, in the United Kingdom line Air accident research branchNot to distribute guilt, but for the industry to learn lessons.

Aviation Security It is an absolute social triumph, which has been achieved in part through this type of consistent research, with the active dissemination of the lessons learned. Some excellent investigations of tailings accidents have been completed, but the pattern is irregular and the diffusion is incoherent.

It is time for the tailings industry to approach the dish.

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC -nd 3.0
Except when indicating otherwise, the images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission of the copyright owner is prohibited.

Related