Sunday, April 21, 2013

Bingham Canyon Copper Mine Highwall Failure










If you're part of the mining industry, then undoubtedly you've seen these photos this week. These photos are from Bingham Canyon mine, which is a major copper mine in the US, and represents about 6% of Rio Tinto's profit.

This wall failure had been predicted back in February, and there was no-one in the pit at the time of the incident. Estimates place the size of the failure at several tens of million cubic yards.

All photos by Ravell Call, Deseret News. For additional photos, see the link.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was the pit almost mined out when this accident occured?

Anonymous said...

No. There was plenty of ore to be mined.

Anonymous said...

If the monitoring predicted the failure why was the mobile plant still in the pit?

Anonymous said...

They planned to continue mining after the failure so they left equipment in the bottom of the pit. They did not expect the slide to be so large.

Eric said...

160,000,000 tons

Anonymous said...

No injuries. That is a great outcome. Equipment can be replaced.

Anonymous said...

Two weeks ago they had a haul truck at the dump site go over backwards 300 feet guy walked away bruised

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