Case study
Morila experienced a tailings spillage on 16 March 2003 when a weld in the tailings pipeline split open, causing the slime to run off the mine property onto
public land. The volume of spilled material has been estimated at 2082 cubic metres, of which more than 96% was contained in catchment
paddocks and trenches on mine property. The remaining 69 cubic metres of spillage affected an area of 1.5 hectares outside the mine property.
A factor that contributed to the significant scale of the incident was the control room’s inability to immediately identify the pipeline breach and