In April 2013, Rio Tinto Kennecott Copper's (RTKC) Bingham Canyon mine experienced what is arguably the world's largest ever in-pit slope failure. The failure initiated along a major, continuous, low-strength bedding fault, named the Manefay bed, and comprised approximately 145Mtonnes of rock and waste dump material. Initial East wall slope deformations were detected some months prior to catastrophic slope collapse by RTKC's slope monitoring systems. However, the failure mechanism was different to that which had historically been experienced in the prior more-than-100 years of open pit mining. Failure occurred as two separate events, the initial one likely consisting of a frictional failure of rock materials along the Manefay bed itself, before a second phase of failure occurred, which included a large mass of old rail dump material. The combination of these events led to a much larger failure run-out than had been anticipated by the RTKC team which led to loss of, and damage to, mining equipment and infrastructure as well as significant interruption to mining activities. Due to the diligent monitoring of the slopes no safety impacts were experienced at the mine, and as such the details and learnings from this failure can readily be shared with the broader mining and geotechnical industries to avoid similar recurrences elsewhere. This is an extended abstract only. CITATION:Robotham, M, 2018. Bingham Canyon Mine - from adversity to excellence, in
Proceedings The Fourth Australasian Ground Control in Mining Conference (AusRock), pp 3-4 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).