Assessment of seismic resistance of combined tailings dams

Abstract

The similarities between the tailings dams and the embankment dams for water storage have contributed a great number of procedures and techniques in the design, construction and maintenance of the conventional dams, to be applied to tailings dams. However, the numerous reports of collapses of the tailings dams in the last three decades, all over the World, indicate that the structural, (static and dynamic), filtration, hydrological and hydraulic safety were not controlled with the same rigor and carefulness – as for the embankment dams. This fact, in part, results from the long-term construction of the tailings dams, where as a building material is used sand obtained by separating of the waste material from floatation process during the exploitation of the mine. In this paper are presented results from the dynamic analysis and assessment of seismic resistance of the hydro tailings Topolnica, on the river Topolnica, in the east part of Republic of Macedonia. It is a tailings dam with a combination of downstream (in the first phase) and upstream (in the second phase) method of construction, with total height from the crest to the downstream toe of the dam of 141.2 m.