IAEG presentation and paper on Attabad

Today I presented an invited paper at the 11th Congress of the IAEG in Auckland, New Zealand on the topic of landslide hazards along the Himalayan Arc.  This paper starts by looking at global and regional landslide hazard before presenting the state of play at Attabad.  As usual, I have uploaded the PowerPoint file to Authorstream, such that you should be able to both view and download it below:

10_09 IAEG petley v2

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The written paper has been published in the conference proceedings.  I do not have a pdf of the actual printed version but I do have one of the final manuscript.  I am working on putting that online, so watch this space.

A pdf of the paper itself is available here:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/w34v38zb4uvzcj4/10_06%20Petley%20invited%20final.pdf

Note that this paper contains a map of global landslide losses in terms of fatalities and some data both for global losses and for those in the Himalaya. 

Note that the typeset format is slightly different from that of the actual published paper, but the content is the same.  The reference to the paper is:
Petley, D.N., Rosser, N.J., Karim, D., Wali, S., Ali, N., Nasab, N. and Shaban, K. 2010. Non-seismic landslide hazards along the Himlayan Arc.  In: Williams, A.L., Pinches, G.M., Chin, C.Y., McMorran, T.J. and Massey, C.I. (eds) Geologically Active.  CRC Press, London, pp. 143-154.

Attabad landslide - my report and presentation from my field visit in February

As the water level at Attabad approaches the spillway, several people have asked that I reposrt the links to the report and presentation that I prepared after my field visit to the site in February.  So here they are:

Report


Presentation (should also be viewable below)

10_03 Attabad

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This is the presentation that I gave to NDMA in Islamabad.  It is the first time it has been freely available.

Presentation of lanslides caused by Tropical Cyclone Aila in Darjeeling

The Savethehills blog has an interesting presentation on their website focusing on the landslides caused by Tropical Cyclone Aila in Northern India in May this year. It can be accessed here:

http://savethehills.blogspot.com/2009/12/cyclone-aila-in-photographs.html

The damage caused by landslides during earthquakes

Below is the presentation file of the keynote lecture that I gave today at the Chilean Geological Congress in Santiago. I have removed a few of the figures as they have not yet been published.

You should be able to download and to view the file below:

Damage caused by earthquake landslides

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The powerpoint file is hosted on Authorstream, which also holds many more of my presentations here:

http://www.authorstream.com/user-presentations/Dr_Dave/

Tailings dam failures and the price of commodities

A couple of weeks ago the University of Alberta hosted a conference entitled "Tailings and Mine Waste 2009". Impressively, all of the presentations from the meeting have been posted online on an FTP site here. Most of the presentations focus upon technical aspects of tailings facility design, but there is a very interesting talk from Michael Davis and Todd Martin from AMEC online as a pdf here. This presentation examines the relationship between the occurrence of tailings dam failures and the economic cycle of commodities. I should say upfront that I find parts of the presentation rather uncomfortable (especially the back-slapping aspects of the last slide regarding the oil sands industry), but the core point of the presentation is certainly thought provoking.

In the presentation they note that between 1968 and August 2009 there were 143 documented tailings dam failures worldwide. However, the occurrence of these failures appears to be cyclic with time, with peaks in the periods 1976-8, 1984-6, 1990-2, 1998-2000 and 2008-now. They compared these peaks with the cyclicity of the global copper and gold prices. The key part of the presentation is a table that compared the timing of the peaks:

The authors' conclusion is that there is a relationship between the peak in commodities prices and the occurrence of tailings dam failures, with a lag between the two of about two years. I must admit that I am a little unconvinced by the statistics of this analysis (I would like to see a proper regression analysis to see whether this link is statistically valid - and to be fair the authors recognise that this is not a scientifically-rigorous analysis), but the central point is one that is certainly very thought provoking. Increased commodity prices drive increased exploitation. The relationship between the peak in prices an the peak in accidents is ascribed by the authors to:

1. The rush to mine quickly means that design and construction standards may be low;
2. Rapid turn-over of key staff as new (presumably lucrative) opportunities arise during the boom;
3. The boom drives the development of resources in areas that are known to be difficult;
4. after the boom there are pressures to cut costs as commodity prices decline;
5. The boom drives the use of inappropriate designs imported from other locations;
6. There may be a lack of independent review, presumably to avoid the time delays and costs associated with this.

The implications of all this are sobering. The most recent boom ended in 2008, and the average lag is 25 months for copper and 29 months for gold. This should mean that the peak in tailings dam failures should be expected 12 to 30 months from now.

Hat-tip to Jack Caldwell's excellent I think Mining blog for highlighting this paper.