Geoffrey Blight completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Civil Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and his PhD at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. The early years of his career were spent at the South African National Building Research Institute, Pretoria, where he was engaged in research on design, operation and safety of mine waste storage facilities, including waste rock dumps and hydraulic fill tailings storage facilities. After the disastrous failure of a coal waste dump at Aberfan, U.K. in 1966, he was sent on a country-wide inspection tour of South African mines to make sure that no similarly threatening stability situations existed locally. Eleven years later, after the disastrous failure of a hydraulic fill tailings dam at Bafokeng, north of Johannesburg, he was asked by the mining industry to write a comprehensive guide to the design, operation and closure of mine waste storage facilities. This appeared in 1979 and has been revised and updated several times since. Geoff Blight re-joined the Department of Civil Engineering at Witwatersrand University in 1969 and the results of his continuing research and consulting work on mine waste have been widely published since.

The present book has been developed from the updated mining industry guide as well as a series of post graduate courses in mine waste management that have been presented for many years. In addition to numerous technical papers published in refereed journals and conference proceedings, he is the editor and co-author of the book "Mechanics of Residual Soil" (Balkema, 1997) and author of "Assessing Loads on Silos and Other Bulk storage Structures" (Taylor and Francis 2006).