Geotechnical Characterization of a Tailing Pond Dam

There are about 30 tailing ponds of different size situated in Hungary. One of them was broken in 2010 and about 40 km2 was flooded by red mud causing 10 casualties and 140 injured. Since this incident Mining Authorities are responsible for the regular inspection of the dams. For testing the available geophysical methods intensive field tests were completed by the Geological and Geophysical Institute of Hungary to help the Authorities. In this presentation the geotechnical and geophysical investigation of a selected tailing dam will be discussed. To investigate the dam 2D and 3D multielectrode DC method together with P- and Rayleigh-wave seismics and CPTu sounding was applied. There were triaxial or direct shear laboratory tests on undisturbed core samples as well. The geotechnical and lab results were compared with the values calculated using the seismic velocities.