The Department of water and sanitation (DWS) has made a desperate plea for mining houses to register all their tailings or mine residue deposit dams on its database on Friday.
This comes as the department updates its database and intensifies regulations on the safety of tailings and mine residue deposit dams to ensure the facilities are regulated.
The department implemented this to avoid another undesirable occurrence such as the devastating Jagersfontein disaster, which took place in September 2022 in the Free State, resulting in loss of lives and properties.
The DWS’s regulation director Wally Ramokopa said: “It is important to provide correct information in order to ensure that the dams are registered and compliant.”
Ramokopa advised that the information should be compiled by a registered engineering professional who has knowledge of dams and tailings storage facilities.
The water utility is empowered by the National Water Act to regulate dams to improve the safety of new and existing dams with a safety risk, which are dams with minimum height of 5m and able to store more than 50 000 m3 of water or water-containing substance, and to reduce the potential for harm to the public, damage to property or to resource quality.
Ramokopa further emphasised that the department soon will execute random inspections to verify the correctness of the information and the existence of the dam(s) as well as collaborate with the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) to ensure compliance.
The information obtained will be used to update the register and monitor these dams as required by the dam safety regulations and the National Water Act (NWA), which also requires an owner of a dam with a safety risk to register the dam within 120 days after the date on which the dam meets the requirements to be classified as a dam with a safety risk as defined in Section 117 of the NWA.
The department will soon execute random inspections to verify the correctness of the information and the existence of the dams, as well as collaborate with the DMRE to ensure compliance.
The department has also linked with the DMRE to obtain the data of mining houses and, as a result, correspondence has been sent to at least 337 tailings dams.
This is so that they can be classified as dams with a safety risk should they meet the requirements and encourage those mining houses that have not disclosed to DMRE their ownership of tailing dams to register with the DWS.
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