The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
As the clean-up after the 13 February 2024 landslide at Çöpler Mine in Turkey continues (as it will for many more months), further information is emerging about the events leading up to the failure.
Although not widely reported, the most significant of these appears to be a set of photos that have been published by the Turkish news site Safya16 that allegedly show cracks in the leach heap on the morning of the landslide. These have been tweeted by a Turkish newspaper columnist too:-
The news report (in Turkish) indicates that these images were taken on the morning of 13 February by contractors working at the site. The report includes the following:
“Mert Batur , Organizing Secretary of the Independent Mining Workers’ Union , gave the following information about the photographs taken just before the incident:
“Photos are taken by workers around 10:00 in the morning. It is sent to company officials through the risk notification system. Information is given. These are the cracks on the roads where construction equipment moves in the field. Workers are nervous because they know that the area will collapse. Some small subcontracting companies, except Anagold and Çiftay, are withdrawing their workers. The workers of these companies are not even aware of it. Then the incident happens around 14.28.”“
The most worrying of these images is probably this one, which shows tension cracks and a possible graben structure high up on the slope at Çöpler Mine:-
If these images are as reported, serious questions need to be asked as to how and why these indications of precursory deformation were ignored. On the face of it, these cracks appear to have been an indication that the slope had fundamental problems.
There are other oddities in the aftermath of the disaster. Perhaps most perplexing is an “Expert Preliminary Report” that has been released that apparently indicates that Anagold was not fundamentally at fault for the disaster. Instead, Anagold bears secondary responsibility, with primary blame being attributed as follows:
The deputy operations director was found fundamentally at fault on the grounds that he did not analyze risky situations and did not take the necessary precautions to protect employees from risks.
The report stated that “as a competent authorized person, he did not take the necessary precautions to identify the dangerous situations that may arise at the construction site and protect them from risks, he did not establish the necessary control and surveillance mechanism to prevent the health of the employees in the workplace from being adversely affected, and if he did, he did not enforce it, and as an authorized person, the cracks that formed in the pile in the morning caused negativities on the construction site.” It was stated that he showed reckless behavior in terms of opening the door.
The news report also blames other individuals, including the “process oxide manager, oxide operation chief engineer, oxide operation engineer, and piping supervisor”, as well workers from other companies or entities such as Çiftay A.Ş., Kar-Sa A.Ş., Asil Çöpler A.Ş. and Asil Keklik A.Ş.
This is of course quite strange as, in general, a company bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of its employees and contractors. Maybe something is lost in translation, or perhaps liability works in a different way in Turkish law.
