Two tailings dams in Zambia's Copperbelt failed within days of each other in February 2025, cutting off drinking water for 700,000 people, and there is still no global database tracking which dams are at risk

On February 18, 2025, a tailings dam at Sino Metal Leach Limited, a Chinese-owned copper mine near Kitwe in Zambia's Copperbelt Province, collapsed and discharged approximately 50 million liters of acidic water laden with heavy metals into the Chambishi stream, a tributary of the Kafue River. The contamination forced the shutdown of public water distribution, leaving 700,000 people in Kitwe without potable water. Days later, a second tailings dam failure was discovered at the nearby Rong Xin Limited mine, compounding the contamination. Fish died en masse, farmers lost crops, livestock perished, and communities downstream suffered skin and diarrheal diseases from contact with contaminated water. In March 2025, a tailings dam called Laguna Kenko failed in Bolivia's Llallagua District, killing two people and destroying 47 houses. These are not isolated events. The global rate of tailings dam failures has not decreased despite decades of engineering knowledge about their risks. A March 2026 EPA working paper documented the ongoing correlation between tailings dam failures and natural hazards in the US, while climate change is making the triggers (intense storms, drought-flood cycles) more frequent and severe. The most alarming aspect is the information gap. There is no comprehensive global database of tailings dams, their condition, their contents, or their risk profiles. The standard of public reporting on tailings dam incidents is poor, with many failures going completely unreported or lacking basic facts when reported. After the 2019 Brumadinho disaster in Brazil killed 270 people, the industry launched the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM), but adoption is voluntary and verification is inconsistent. Mining companies self-report dam conditions with no independent audit requirement in most jurisdictions. This problem persists because tailings dams are orphan infrastructure. They generate no revenue; they are pure cost centers for mining companies. Incentives favor building new dams cheaply over maintaining existing ones robustly. Many tailings dams were constructed decades ago to older engineering standards and have been expanded incrementally without comprehensive stability reassessment. When mines close, the dams remain as permanent liabilities that require perpetual monitoring and maintenance, but the companies that built them may no longer exist.