Cross-Regional Critical Review of Major Tailings Dam Failures: Case Histories, Failure Mechanisms, Governance Breakdowns, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Tailings storage facilities are long-lived engineered systems whose failure can transform a localized geotechnical instability into a rapid, far-reaching disaster. This structured critical narrative review provides a cross-regional synthesis of historical case evidence, geotechnical and hydrological mechanisms, breach and runout behavior, environmental and social consequences, governance, and monitoring. The evidence base comprises a pre-curated corpus of 110 scientific and technical publications and two international standards. Physical-mechanism confidence and organizational/control confidence were evaluated separately at claim level using source independence, proximity to the event, cross-method convergence, observational quality, competing interpretations, and dependence on retrospective back-analysis. The synthesis shows that catastrophic outcomes rarely arise from a single isolated defect. Instead, failure develops through interacting vulnerabilities in material state, pore-pressure and water control, geometry, foundations, construction history, operations, surveillance, and decision-making. The distinctive contribution is a case-to-control architecture linking predisposing state, trigger, mechanism, breach/runout, hazard, exposure and vulnerability, consequences, and the degradation of preventive, detective, and mitigative barriers. Monitoring is decision-relevant only when weak signals are evaluated against baselines, trends, measurement uncertainty, mechanistic plausibility, and corroborating observations.