Mining Accidents

A world chronology of major mine tailings lagoons failures from 1970 reveals that out of a total of thirty failures five took place in Europe. Three of these happened only within three years, raising public concern when they occurred.

The OMENTIN network has started as a response to the Baia Mare accident in Romania in January 2001. The disaster has shown that the lack of accurate and factual information and an established information channel between mining experts, environmentalists and interested citizens has further worsened the situation.

As our economies demand large amounts of raw materials, mining will continue to exist, be that in Europe (where we do have power to demand improved mining security) or outside. The OMENTIN network believes that "ousting" mining from Europe is not a solution to handling risks associated with mining: in third world countries these problems will only aggregate, therefore the problems sooner or later will come back to us.

The OMENTIN network aims to contribute to improving mining security in Europe by learning from the experience of recent accidents and using this knowledge and the established communication channel to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of possible future accidents.

About the Baia Mare and Baia Borsa accidents

Being one of the most severe industrial accidents in Europe since Chernobyl, hundred thousand cubic metres of cyanide and heavy metal containing waste water was spilled from a tailings pond dam at a mine in Baia Mare, Romania. The toxins flowed into the river Lapus, the Szamos, the Tisza, and finally the Danube rivers. The spill has fully eradicated all living organisms in these water streams. Luckily, due to efficient human action (sealing off side-branches of the Tisza river), the time of year (January) and quick water flow, the natural environment has recovered relatively fast, and no lasting damage was registered.

In an atmosphere of major public outcry and international tension, another accident followed only five weeks later. (Baia Borsa, March 2000) In this case a burst dam released large amounts of heavy metal containing waste water into the Vaser, Viseu and Tisza rivers.

For detailed information on both accidents please read our detailed report: "Thirty Months Later: A Follow-up of the Baia Mare Accident"  (51-page, 3.6-MByte PDF file).

These accidents were caused by a combination of the following: inadequate design of tailing ponds, improper management of tailing ponds and extreme weather conditions. As the first two issues can and should definitely be improved, the OMENTIN network aims to contribute to the prevention of similar future accidents by facilitating the transfer of best practices in tailing pond design and management.