APELL and Tailings Dams
UNEP’s APELL
(Awareness and Preparedness for Emergency at Local Level) Programme has been
designed to help companies, local governments, and emergency services put
together a co-ordinated plan to improve public preparedness in the case of
industrial accidents, including those that occur at mine sites.
As Tailings
accidents may involve either physical or chemical consequences for persons and
the environment, both these aspects need to be considered in emergency
response. An informed public will initially question the acceptability of any
externally imposed risk. Therefore, the company often undertakes a thorough
risk management study as part of its APELL involvement and discusses the study
with its partners. This allows the
community as well as the response organisations to participate in developing
the best accident prevention and mitigation strategies as well as planning and
practicing emergency preparedness arrangements. The involvement of all stakeholders
who may be affected by or involved with an emergency will help to reduce the
probability of an occurrence, and the negative consequences in the event one
does occur. The company, the emergency
responders, relief organisations, and community will be better prepared to deal
with the emergency, with an apparent overall reduction in the general anxiety
level. On the other hand, an uninformed
community will be anxious and mistrustful.
This may prevent the mining company from being able to communicate with
them effectively during an emergency.
It is too late to
develop a plan once the emergency is under way. For example, the response to the recent tailings accidents in
Spain, Guyana and the Philippines may have been appropriate given the
circumstances. But during the emergency, it became obvious that nobody had
seriously considered the possibility of a tailings dam collapsing. Consequently, measures for prevention and
mitigation were not developed. The company,
the response agencies, and the public were not aware of the potential consequences
of a spill beforehand. The result being
that the credibility of action taken by the companies suffered. Trying to build confidence in the middle of a
crisis is futile.
The basis of the
APELL Programme is the establishment of a broadly based coordinating group that
ensures information about the risks and the precautionary measures, is made
available to all stakeholders according to their needs. The coordinating group
acts as the central point for dialogue, information exchange and questions. The
group includes community leaders as well as emergency response specialists.
The APELL program has been applied at many industrial sites around
the world. The handbook and supporting material are available in more than 20
languages. There is also a pool of UN and national experts to assist individual
companies and communities in developing sound emergency plans that include
public preparedness. The procedure is directly applicable to tailings
structures as well as to other potentially hazardous mining operations.
More information can be obtained from the APELL website: http://www.uneptie.org/apell/