Reported tailings dam failures.A review of the European incidents in the worldwide context

7 páginas, 5 figuras.-- El PDF del artículo es su versión post-print.A detailed search and re-evaluation of the known historical cases of tailings dam failure was carried out. A corpus of 147 cases of worldwide tailings dam disasters, from which 26 located in Europe, was compiled in a database. This contains six sections, including dam location, its physical and constructive characteristics, actual and putative failure cause, sludge hydrodynamics, socio-economical consequences and environmental impacts. Europe ranks in second place in reported accidents (18%), more than one third of them in dams 10–20 m high. In Europe, the most common cause of failure is related to unusual rain, whereas there is a lack of occurrences associated with seismic liquefaction, which is the second cause of tailings dam breakage elsewhere in the world. Moreover, over 90% of incidents occurred in active mines, and only 10% refer to abandoned ponds. The results reached by this preliminary analysis show an urgent need for EU regulations regarding technical standards of tailings disposalThis research has been funded by the European Commission through the project “A regional enterprise network decision-support system for environmental risk and disaster management of large-scale industrial spills”, e-EcoRisk Project (contract no. EVG1-2002-0068) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (HP2006-0072).Peer reviewe