Tailings dam is essentially a subset of embankment dam that adapts to the special characteristics and requirements of the mining industry to provide the storage facility for ever-increasing quantities of fine-grained tailings. Thus, the failure modes of tailings dams are the same as embankment dams. However, because many differences exist in the practice of water-retention embankment dams and tailings dams, their historical performance records do differ. The databases of dam incidents/failures of the respective categories are discussed in Lo (Safeguard embankment dam safety, 2019).