On 11 September 2022, a diamond mine waste storage facility, known as a tailings dam, failed in the town of Jagersfontein in the Free State province of South Africa. In the failure, one person was killed and multiple homes destroyed. Tailings are the finely ground leftovers that remain after valuable metals are removed from rock ore. Tailings are generally transported jointly with water and deposited in a tailings dam for storage. Now, six months later in 2023, civil engineers at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), have used public satellite and aerial imagery in a study to investigate the history of the Jagersfontein dam. Sources of public satellite images used in the study included Google Earth Pro and the Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 satellite missions. Additionally, some of the immediate consequences of the failure were assessed using commercial satellite images.
