Tailings dams represent a substantial risk for adjacent communities in mining areas. South Africa’s most recent experience of a tailings dam tragedy, the 2022 collapse of a tailings dam in Jagersfontein in the Free State, led to the deaths of three people.
Another four were confirmed missing with 40 others being taken to hospital. The destruction to housing and other infrastructure in the affected community was in the tens of millions of rands.
According to Alastair Bovim, CEO of tailings monitoring and analytics platform Insight Terra, tragedies like the one in Jagersfontein are preventable. Technological advances have given mining engineers the ability to monitor tailings dams – which contain vast volumes of mining waste sludge – in real time.
When engineers have insight into a dam’s inner movements, composition and the level of risk posed by external events such as heavy rains or even earthquakes, pre-emptive action can be taken.
“Tailings waste is an outcome of the mining process and, depending on the type of metal being mined, the waste typically has to be stored and managed,” Bovim told TechCentral in a recent interview. “Sometimes it is dry tailings, so heaps of rocks, but where the risk lies is with wet tailings.”
Bovim explained that a tailings dam is like a living organism that grows as more sludge is added to it. The wall of the dam is expanded every six months to a year. The gunk at the bottom of the dam tends to condense and harden, while the top contains more water and is sludgier, he said.
Mining engineers use a variety of instruments at different parts of the dam, including under it and in the dam wall, to collect data about the overall environment. Inclinometers, for example, measure changes in the slope angles of dam embankments and piezometers measure pore water pressure at different points in the dam.
Predictive analysis
The data is fed into Insight Terra’s cloud-based analytics engine. After it is processed, meaningful data points can be extracted. According to Bovim, these data points differ from mine to mine depending on the type of waste being dealt with and the nature of the external environment, so the mine’s engineering team often decides which parameters are important to pay attention to.
The analytics engine also builds models to perform predictive analysis of a tailings dam, sending warnings to team members when certain parameters are outside predefined tolerances or risks are spotted.
Bovim said the environment a mine is in places limitations on the types of technologies that can be used. Some sites have access to fibre backhaul or 4G mobile coverage, but in the most remote environments, satellites are the only internet infrastructure available.
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“In some scenarios we collect everything, preprocess the data and compact it by about 70% before sending it into the cloud. In that way we can use the satellite connectivity very efficiently because it is usually more expensive than 4G or 5G,” said Bovim.
Insight Terra’s first project was in Mexico in 2018. The company continues to run projects in various parts of the world including Chile, Norway and South Africa. The combination of environmental monitoring tools with data analytics for predictive insights extends beyond tailings dams; Insight Terra’s other projects include monitoring land stability in areas where landslides are a high risk and methane gas observation in agriculture and oil & gas operations.
The Global Tailings Review sets the industry standards for mining tailings management. The Global Tailings Management Institute (GTMI), an independent body created in partnership with the UN Environmental Programme to audit how well mining companies adhere to the standard, has selected South Africa as its headquarters. Bovim said GTMI choosing South Africa as its home is going to play an important role in improving safety standards in the country as well as in developing globally in-demand technical skills for the tailings management sector.
Data analytics and internet-of-things skills are at the core of the Insight Terra platform, but the company has over the years built up an advisory board of subject matter experts in various aspects of the mining process. This team, which offers advisory services to mines as an adjunct to the analytics platform – is made up of specialists in risk management, operations management, hydrogeology and other fields, said Bovim.
“We have built up a lot of subject matter expertise ourselves but we are still not engineers, we just build what they want so they can make decisions quickly and not spend their time lost in spreadsheets. Engineers want to spend most of their time applying their professional judgment,” said Bovim. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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