The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
On Sunday 16 March 2025 at about 5 am local time a major failure of a tailings dam occurred at Andavilque, in Llallagua municipality, Potosí department in Bolivia. This was a really significant event – latest reports are that two people were killed and 47 homes have been destroyed.
The location of the failure is [-18.4192, -66.5609]. This is a Planet image of the site, collected on 5 February 2025:-
And here is an image of the aftermath of the landslide, collected yesterday:-
And here is a very rough and ready image compare:-
This is a Google Earth image of the site:-
The marker shows the lagoon that has ruptured. Andavilque is in the lower centre of the image. The runout distance of the main part of the landslide is about 5 km to the Rio Valaque, but a small portion of the tailings appear to have gone further.
News reports indicate that the mine was owned by a businessman but the waste was under the management of the Comibol, the Mining Corporation of Bolivia.
The lagoon that collapse, known as Laguna Kenko, is the subject of a paper (Romero et al. 2014) in Science of the Total Environment. This notes that primary tin mining had ceased at the site, but that the tailings were being reprocessed to extract tin, with the mine wastes being discharged into the river to the north of the site. The analysis suggests that the tailings have high concentrations of potentially toxic elements, including tin, iron, arsenic, copper, zinc, lead and cadmium.
I will try to pull together a more detailed post in the next day or so.
References
Romero et al. 2014. The role of cassiterite controlling arsenic mobility in an abandoned stanniferous tailings impoundment at Llallagua, Bolivia. Science of the Total Environment, 481, 100-107.
Planet Team. 2025. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/
