Humanizing the Tailings Machine
Not too long ago I heard the phrase “humanizing the experience” and as I have been dealing a lot with tailings management systems, it made me wonder how one might humanize tailings management, as complex as it is.
Let’s start with a couple of definitions from Collindsictionary.com for “humanize” that suites this purpose:
if you humanize a situation or condition, you improve it by changing it in a way which makes it more suitable and pleasant for people; and
to make human; give a human nature or character to
Given these definitions, I’ll suggest that my attempt might not completely humanize this complex system, but my hope is to put it in a context that most people might begin to appreciate and understand.
The Facilities & Their “Responsible People”
Every tailings management facility is different, unique in shape, form, function, foundation, climate conditions, and more. So, the best way we might think of these facilities is to maybe think of them as children. Such facilities, once created, are entities that you can help to guide as they change and grow over time.
In this light, we can position the parents as the owners, and their trusted, experienced family members, the engineer of record, the designer, and any review board or advisory members.
The parents want what’s best for their expected child and they work with their family to help them do the right things. But the parents don’t have all the choices in the world. There are limitations in which they must work. Their city, their social surroundings, where they work, is not something they can change.
Setting up for Success
What they can choose? The neighborhood - somewhere safe with lots of other kids where a new family might be welcomed, high-quality child care and schools, the house they’ll build or buy, and what they might provide that child over the years.
Starting at the beginning, we can give our children the best opportunity for success by choosing the best neighborhood in which to live, ensuring the right environment for safety, stability, and growth over the long term. Getting to know what we can about various locations in order to choose the best one.
For a tailings facility, this means knowing what is in the potential foundation, looking for solid ground and no connections to local groundwater resources. We need to understand the climate conditions and how that might impact our future performance, and we also need to know that we can easily obtain the materials we need to build our containment infrastructure, or “house” if you will.
Next, we want to ensure our house will be structurally strong and safe, it will withstand the weather, and it will have room for a family to grow in. Our tailings dams are no different - they need to be designed with integrity, strong and durable, with layers built in to increase resiliency against the elements. Able to withstand variable climate and unexpected events such as earthquakes, flooding, heavy rainfall, and more.
Of course, a great design is nothing if the builders don’t do their jobs well! We need to monitor the construction of our new house to make sure it’s built the way we expect it to be. So, we must make sure we have quality builders, and ways to check on the progress and how well things are done. We can’t expect a house to last if a number of critical parts are left out, right?!
Lastly, we move in and start to raise that child - the most difficult part! Because raising kids is a unique experience. No two kids are alike, and while there are general guidelines around (everyone has an opinion!), you must go in knowing that you will forever be on a learning and continuous adaptation journey!
Managing External Influences
Children have so many external influences acting on them throughout their lives. They will be bombarded with both positive and negative experiences, and how well you monitor and deal with all of these influences is what will make the difference for your child. But as a parent, you can’t be everywhere with your child, at all times. You can’t know what’s always going on inside of them.
Can you help them to thrive? Who will help you to know what might be going on?
In simpler times and smaller communities, it used to be that everyone knew everyone else. And as a parent, you could know a lot more about what’s happening in your child’s life. Others might tell you about incidents they’ve witnessed - they’ve seen who your child was with, where they’ve been, what they’ve been up to. You might know a bit more about their days and why, if they are upset, that is. Such extra information, those extra sets of eyes, might be helpful to support your child (although the rebellious child might not be too happy about all this oversight!)
But tailings systems are not rebellious children. They don’t have an opinion where they might disagree with how you raise them. They also don’t care how many needles you poke and prod them with, or how many tracking sensors or monitors you might put on, or inside of them. You can inject supplements into them to make them stronger, watch their every move, scour their surfaces, and monitor everything about their health and how their internals are working too. Ah, if raising children were only so easy!
But they are complex, and they do have to endure many external influences, including how we treat them. And unfortunately, they can’t cry out to warn us or ask for help if something has gone wrong. We must be vigilant at all times, watching for those things that might cause them harm. We must watch for the tell-tale signs that something might not be quite right, that something could be happening on the inside, something we might be able to correct if we are quick to act. But back to an earlier point - parents, on their own, can not be in all places, at all times. And sensors can only go so far to tell you what’s going on.
So in that light, we need a village. We need the support of all those other sets of eyes in our on-site community. We need others to support those parents and extended family to do the right things. We need the gossip to be shouted from the roof-tops, not spoken in hushed circles. And we need all to be willing to jump in to help out when that child is in need of some attention.
I hope you realize I’m still talking about tailings management systems. The lessons are the same. What might be different is that, without training, others in the community might not know what to watch for. They won’t know what a “bad situation” or “failing conditions” look like. Raising children is much more common and heck, we all were children once, so we get it - we’d likely see a lot more and understand what could be going on, at least enough to mention it to the parent, if it’s something wrong. That’s not the case with tailings systems.
Filling in Gaps
What about the situations where we just don’t know what our children have been through? What if you are an adoptive family and/or didn’t have control over earlier phases of their life, or situations they became involved with? Situations that might have caused some internal impacts…
Due to the long lives of mining sites, and the frequency of mergers and acquisitions, we often face situations where we don’t have all the information about the older infrastructure. Either because it wasn’t documented or records maintained appropriately, or because the information was not passed over from the “keeper” of the original files (often past consultants of previous owners).
In these situations, we need to learn as much as we can about these infrastructures by doing additional site investigations, sometimes instrumentation installations, and more. While there are always gaps in the history for these dams, there is much we can learn, and with those results, we can gain greater insights into ways of reducing risks associated with them.
So what do I hope you take away from all this?
Parting Thoughts
Owners need to control what they can - choose the right site, and make sure you know as much as you can about that site. Ensure a solid, reliable and stable design that works for the site in question, and make sure it is built right. And partner with your trusted experts to help ensure all of this happens!
Put the right operating and management systems in place, with redundancies and protection measures, and appropriate training, so operators know what to do in any given situation. But be careful about simply directly adopting a set of standards or protocols designed for one facility and apply it to another. It is easy to be led by norms and expectations, then be surprised because you haven’t looked openly or widely enough at site-specific conditions and unique scenarios. As with raising children, one size does not fit all, and many things can get missed or neglected, but later turn out to be very important. With children, it is perhaps missed opportunities, but with dams, it is lost chances to be proactive and avoid costly or catastrophic situations.
Support your operating teams, ensure they have the right training and involve those additional sets of eyes by training others who might work around the infrastructure, to know what to report on, in the event they spot something amiss. If you have the resources, remote monitoring options can help too, but only if it’s the right data being gathered, the data is manageable, and it’s being interpreted in real-time.
And finally, create that open collaborative network, where people feel safe to voice their concerns, knowing that actions will be taken when they speak up.
Tailings infrastructures are not like well-oiled manufacturing plants, where all the moving parts are precision-made and inputs can be completely controlled. We can’t tweak operating parameters to ensure the process is always exactly consistent. Everything is variable, all the time. But what we can do is know what we are aiming for, how it’s supposed to perform, what our limits are, and how we should react in various situations. And learning how to adapt those practices with each and every shift in the conditions we are faced with.
That is our best control of the system. Creating a strong village. Be vigilant in both systems, integration, and continual improvement. Always learning. Always adapting to make things better. And always working together to stay on top of it all.
Karen Chovan is the Principal of Enviro Integration Strategies and Vice Chair of CIM Environmental and Social Responsibility Society. She has worked for 20 years in the mining sector, focused on tailings and mine waste management, and sustainability practices, giving her insight into the challenges and opportunities for improvements that can be made in operations, projects, and corporate environments.