Dr. Nigel Wight, a researcher at SMI-ICE-Chile, along with a team from the Sustainable Minerals Institute at The University of Queensland, have just published a major scientific study titled «What Remains: Disaster Risk and Emergency Preparedness in a Chilean Mining Town», in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
On March 28, 1965, an earthquake with its epicenter in Cabildo and La Ligua caused the collapse of two tailings dams — earthen and rockfill structures designed to store liquid or semi-liquid mining waste— at the El Soldado copper mine, causing more than 300 deaths and almost completely burying the town of El Cobre. To this day, it remains one of the most serious mining tragedies in Chile and worldwide.
The article, authored by Professor Deanna Kemp, Dr. Jill Harris, Dr. Nigel Wight, and researcher Angelica Amanda Andrade, highlights the long-term social impacts of the disaster, delving into how survivors and their families continue to live with the legacy of that event in the present. It also notes the limited academic and institutional attention paid to the social consequences of this mining disaster, even though —as the authors state— “the El Soldado failure remains the most fatal and serious tailings disaster in Latin America in the 20th century, disrupting the very foundations of the social fabric of the surrounding area.”
This study also links this historical disaster to current tailings risks in Chile and examines how institutional systems extend and reproduce the underlying conditions of the disaster.
Through qualitative interviews with firsthand witnesses and family members, we explored their memories of the disaster, how they experience ongoing risk, and how they currently approach emergency preparedness. “While regulations and institutional mechanisms have evolved, our findings suggest that, for the most affected people, the core dynamics of exposure, disengagement, and responsibility have not fundamentally changed,” the article states. “The introduction of emergency systems that include sirens, signals, and drills have improved technical visibility, but in the absence of meaningful participation, these systems are not seen by survivors as solutions, but rather as signals that institutions are maintaining a distance. Risk governance appears to them as an incomplete structure rather than a protective framework: symbolically present but socially disconnected.”
It is also noted that the issue of institutional silence points to a critical but under-examined characteristic of risk governance. “Silence, in this context, is not neutral. It is a practice that reinforces distance and makes communities feel helpless. Future research could distinguish between tactical omission, communication failure, and institutional disengagement, and assess how each shapes disaster risk and emergency preparedness outcomes.”
More broadly, this study reinforces the importance of longitudinal and local social research in mining regions where the effects of tailings disasters persist. It also confirms the importance of community narratives for better understanding disaster risk and emergency preparedness. “The risks associated with tailings facilities are not only technical but also historical, institutional, and relational,” the authors conclude. “Addressing these dimensions is essential to strengthening tailings risk governance and recognizing the people who live, often in silence, with the consequences of industrial disasters.”
Read the full article at this link
What Remains: Disaster Risk and Emergency Preparedness in a Chilean Mining Town – ScienceDirect
