Opencast mines are awesome in the way that explosives, massive high-pressure water jets and huge machines are used to tear away whole mountains to extract iron, coal or other minerals. For every ton of ore produced, much larger quantities of unwanted earth and wastewater are moved off the site into huge cofferdams.
It was one such dam in southeastern Brazil which collapsed this January sending a tsunami of mud surging down onto the mining town of Brumadinho. More than 300 people perished. This week the bosses of the giant Brazilian mining company Vale, which owns the mine, have been removed after evidence emerged that management were warned the structure had become unstable. Known as an “upstream” dam, it is actually built of the same waste material, the “tailings”, that it was supposed to hold in. This type of coffer work is regarded around the world as high-risk because the rock and earth it contains is more likely to liquefy and fail.
The popular anger in Brazil is the greater because this is not the first time an “upstream” Vale dam has crumbled. In 2015 another of these constructions collapsed at the neighboring Samarco mine killing 19 people. No one has ever been held accountable for that disaster. Moreover, when a legislative committee recently questioned Vale chief executive Fabio Schvartsman, it emerged that fines imposed on the company for that tragedy have still not been paid. Lawmakers were not impressed by Schvartsman’s evasive testimony and were incensed when he claimed that Vale was “a Brazilian jewel” that could not be condemned for an “accident” that had happened at one of its dams “even though it was such a big tragedy”.
Seventeen employees have already been held for questioning and the courts have frozen Vale’s assets and ordered the suspension of a number of the company’s lucrative mining operations. Overnight, some $19 billion was wiped off the firm’s stock value.
Brazil is already mired in corruption scandals which have seen former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva jailed along with other leading politicians, bankers and executives as a result of ongoing payola investigations that have rocked public confidence in the establishment. The country’s new president, the center-right Jair Bolsonaro, has vowed to clamp down and clean up corruption. Unfortunately, there is concern that allegations of financial wrongdoing are lapping against members of his own administration.
Bolsonaro could do no better than address the arrogance and neglect of which the Vale company is clearly guilty. Schvartsman and his colleagues are insisting they have only stepped down from their positions on a temporary basis. This is just not acceptable and Bolsonaro should make this clear. The company was recently warned by German inspectors after a survey that there were serious issues with the Brumadinho tailings dam. That alert over such a critical matter should have been passed to the very top of the business. If it was not, Schvartsman and his fellow top executives still have no excuse, since if they had been running the company properly, they would have been informed. They should be fired. Brazil has some 790 other tailings dams, many of them “upstream” constructions and not all of them owned by Vale. The president and regulators must take immediate action, at whatever cost, to ensure the Brumadinho dam collapse is the last such catastrophe.
