A major tailings accident occurred last week in a Chrome mine at Dikwena near Brits.
On 13 August 20926, a major failure occurred in a large tailings storage facility at the Dikwena facility, owned by Samancor Chrome in the Brits area of South Africa. There are news reports from IOL and the Daily Maverick about this major accident.
The Daily Maverick article includes a video of the aftermath of the TSF failure, collected by Iaan Myburgh, showing the aftermath of the failure. This is a still from that video:-
The failure appears to have originated in a failure of the dam wall of one of the TSF’s at the site:-
The location of the failure appears to have been 25.65236° S, 27.85177° E [-25.65236, 27.85177]. This is a Google Earth image of the site, with the location of the breach marked, collected on 15 July 2026:-
It is interesting to note that this TSF does not appear to have been active in July.
On LinkedIn, Adam Thomas has posted a Sentinel-2 image of the aftermath of the failure. Peter McGough has also posted a range of images and videos.
Finally, the Daily Maverick article has an interesting interview with a tailings expert, Alastair Bovim, about this site:-
“What we believe occurred is that the original TSF was re-mined between 2019 and 2022 and then in 2022 a new facility was designed, which then started operation in 2024,” said Bovim.
He said that from 2022 to 2024, historical satellite imagery shows new dams and walls being constructed.
This event asks many questions. I wonder how many answers we’ll get.
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