June 22 - 25, 2025
Delta Hotel and Conference Centre
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Biography
Luciano A. Oldecop was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He obtained a Degree in Civil Engineering from the National University of San Juan (UNSJ) in 1989. In 2001, he completed his Ph.D. at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Since 1990, he has been a member of the research staff of the Instituto de Investigaciones Antisísmicas "Ing. Aldo Bruschi" (IDIA) in San Juan, Argentina. For more than three decades, he has been actively involved in technical assistance activities for the hydropower, mining, and nuclear industries. His research interests include soil liquefaction, unsaturated soils, soil-atmosphere interaction, seismic hazard assessment, and the design and safety of water and tailings dams. He has been particularly interested in the applications of unsaturated soil mechanics concepts to mine waste disposal. He has been a full professor since 2012 and leads the Ph.D. Program in Civil Engineering at UNSJ. As of September 2019, he is the Vice Director of IDIA.
Abstract
A back analysis of a failure case of a small ancient tailings dam that occurred some 60 years ago was attempted with limited success. Upper Castaño Viejo is the only flow failure of a tailings deposit that occurred in Argentina. The data for the analysis were collected from oral accounts, field exploration campaigns, and laboratory testing. A finite element flow model and limit equilibrium analysis were used for trying to reproduce the failure process. Ancient tailings dams like the study case can be assimilated to the upstream-raised typology. A vast number of such facilities, remains of past mining activities, exist in a variety of care conditions. Hence, a better understanding of their failure mechanisms is certainly relevant. In the case presented, the malfunctioning of a decant pipe was primarily suspected to have caused the failure. However, reproducing the failure process was not straightforward. Additional hypotheses had to be