This appears on first inspection to have been what might be described as buttressing on the downstream side. This was not matched on the east side, for example. It is very clear that the wall of the tailings dam on the southeast corner was greatly thickened over the two year period. Note the buttressed walls of dam on the southereastern side. Google Earth image of the Jagersfontein tailings dam from February 2021. This is a Google Earth image from February 2019:. Of particular focus will be the walls on the southern edge of the facility. Operations were suspended at least once, reportedly because of concerns about regulatory compliance. It appears from the satellite imagery and from Google Earth that old spoil heaps were being “mined”, with the waste being stored in a greatly expanded tailings storage facility. One key question is whether the facility fell between regulatory stools because it was a reprocessing centre rather than an active mine. Inevitably, there is a great deal of interest in what happened at the Jagersfontein tailings dam site of the in the period leading up to the failure. There are reports of further pollution problems at the site as a result of the discharge of sewage into the river because of the loss of sewage treatment facilities in the accident. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission. It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.Satellite image of the Kalkfontein Reservoir, collected on 12 September 2022, before the Jagersfontein tailings dam accident. But there is no real commitment to this idea in the drama. As Stefan says, it is “Stunde Null, Year Zero, everything can start again”. She is almost a darker version of the chatty, insensitive Dolly Messiter in Brief Encounter (1946).Īs a love story, the film is supposed to derive a kind of energy from the devastation itself, a sense that with everything flattened, things can be reimagined. Mrs Burnham loves to gossip, though with an edge of shrewdness and spite. Rachel is in the habit of taking tea with an expat acquaintance in Hamburg, Susan Burnham ( Kate Phillips), the wife of a boorish intelligence officer, played by Martin Compston. Freda meets up with Albert ( Jannik Schümann), a menacing young man from the town, and it is eerily like Liesl, the 16-going-on-17-year-old widower’s daughter in The Sound of Music, having her covert assignations with telegram boy Rolf, with his sinister loyalties. It is reminiscent of Suite Française – though not quite as glib as that other prestigious period production about postwar love and guilt, The Reader.Īnd other parts of the film seem borrowed, too. But, even if it did look plausible, there is something too easy in the way the horrors and guilt of the second world war are slathered in this tragi-romantic syrup. The pair’s first kiss is lacking in the despairing passion that it is supposed to radiate. The emotional flashpoints of this secret love are frankly forced and unconvincing. And these lonely souls are drawn together. And so, with an awful inevitability, Lewis is away all day neglecting his wife’s emotional needs, and leaving her to brood over the beautiful Steinway in the house. In theory, Stefan and Freda should be packed off to a camp, but Lewis has the grace to be embarrassed about this, and allows Stefan and Freda to live in the attic, with Stefan permitted to do humble work in the garden. The Morgans have the right to requisition un-bombed German houses as their living quarters and they are assigned the beautiful home of Stefan Lubert (Skarsgård), sensitive architect, widower and non-party-member and his difficult teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann). With him, Lewis has brought his beautiful, emotionally brittle wife Rachel (Knightley) who is trying her best to confront the secret pain in their marriage, about which Lewis is in denial. He is there to administer the postwar settlement, to keep order among the fractious civilian population – traumatised by the devastating British bombing – and to supervise the “denazification” process, the purpose of which is to root out unrepentant Hitlerites. The year is 1946 and Colonel Lewis Morgan (Clarke) is part of the British military posting in Hamburg, a decent man but emotionally cold.
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