Not so good PR, page-35

It's hard to keep an earthquake secret from the public. No brownie points for being psychic about earthquakes after they happen. I would have liked to have posted about it at the time but I have been "absent" from HC. Not that I advocate the earthquake as an absolute cause for the wall failure. I don't know yet. This quake was very shallow and had aftershocks. Nothing out of the norm as far as Richter Scale numbers at Siana, but every quake is going to impact differently. As a side note - the deadliest landslide in the recent Nepalese quake came 3 days after the main shaker.

Ideally I guess they'd like to now do a significant cutback into the east side, if real estate and budget were compliant. However it seems they previously decided to work around the old failure with, from what I can gather, little work to re-engineer it. Hope has a limited life span.

I don't think you can blame pit water for wall failures when the failures appear to be in the upper benches and the pit floor is in more competent rock and therefore relatively stable. Hydraulic loading in the eastern walls by lake bound groundwater from the range is another matter, and perhaps the expanded dewatering program was also to address modeled risk there as well as to keep the pit dry. Alternatively, maybe the dewatering helped the slip if for example a plane of normally saturated clay was partially dried. It had been dry up until the slip. It's all very tricky and unless you are there, familiar with the site and the geotech work, and then posting on HC, your opinion like mine, remains speculative.

Belated comment here by me. But yet another unfortunate test of their metal, and inability by circumstance to extract it. Williams might be new but is no stranger to adversity.