Catastrophe revisited : disastrous flow failures of mine and municipal solid waste

G.E. Blight, Andy Fourie

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    84 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Catastrophic flow failures have occurred with alarming frequency in mine tailingsdams and dumps of discards and other mine waste. In recent years, catastrophic flow failureshave also occurred in dumps of municipal solid waste and even in what were intended to becarefully controlled and well-engineered landfills. Apart from the environmental devastationcaused by these flows, they are also dangerous to human life and society. Examples include theBuffalo Creek disaster in the USA in 1972 (Vick, Planning, Design and Analysis of TailingsDams, Wiley, 1983) that killed 118 people, made 4000 homeless and destroyed 50 million USdollars worth of property and facilities. The flow slide that occurred in the Umraniye–Hekimbasi refuse dump in Turkey in 1993 (Kocasoy and Curi, Waste Management andResearch, 13, 1995, 305) killed 39 people, destroying their homes in the process. This paper willbriefly review some of the more notable flow slides in waste materials, analyzing conditionsnecessary for a flow failure to occur and pointing to ways of preventing this type of failure by acombination of sound design and operating procedures.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)219-248
    JournalGeotechnical and Geological Engineering
    Volume23
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2005

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