ICMM has put tailings at the centre of the industry’s agenda with its Tailings Innovation Initiative, and the goal it sets is the right one: zero harm to people and nature. I want to add one part of that harm picture that the consequence modelling still tends to leave out, because it happens to be the part that cannot be undone. That is why I am raising it here, with the people who assess, design and manage these facilities.
When a tailings facility is risk classified, the consequence of failure is modelled in detail: loss of life, downstream property, infrastructure, and the natural environment in the inundation path. Cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, rarely makes that list. The geography works against it, because tailings facilities sit in the valleys below the rivers, and those valleys are where people have settled, farmed, buried and worshipped for thousands of years. On a breach the flow path can run straight through the most heritage dense ground in the whole project area, including the deposits under the footprint of the facility itself.
The loss is not only the standing monuments and the buried archaeology. A tailings release settles into riverbeds and floodplains and can leave water unusable for a generation, and for many communities that water carries ritual, washing and burial practice. Cut a community off from it and the practice can stop even though nothing visible has fallen down. That loss is real and attributable to the failure, and it does not appear in a consequence table built around property and infrastructure.
Brumadinho and Mariana showed how far and how fast that flow path reaches. Heritage is the part of the loss that cannot be rebuilt, relocated or compensated once it sits under the tailings. Consequence classification already weighs how far a harm can be put right afterwards, and cultural heritage sits at the far end of that scale, among the highest consequence receptors on the single axis of remediability. It gets filed low, or left out, because it reaches the project as a late stage compliance item instead of a baseline input that gets to the engineers who build the classification.
My argument is a narrow one. If the goal is zero harm to people and nature, the receptor that cannot be put right belongs inside the consequence assessment, from risk classification through to closure.
I have set out what that looks like in practice, a heritage baseline across the full inundation path, a chance finds procedure during construction, and heritage held in the picture to closure, in the full article.
Read it here: https://www.culturalheritageriskmanagement.com/insights-tailings
Neil Fairburn, Director, Cultural Heritage Risk Management Ltd
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