Brumadinho/London | Shortly after employees broke for lunch on January 25, a dam at Vale’s Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil ruptured and collapsed, unleashing a tidal wave of sludge that devoured everything in a 5 kilometre path.
When the thick, brown discharge finally abated, almost 300 people were missing. Many drowned, buried alive in the industrial waste. Others were killed by the force of the impact, their bodies broken into pieces, and some suffocated while submerged in their vehicles. Investigators would later find scratch marks on the windows, where they had tried desperately to escape.
“This was murder,” says Andresa Rodrigues, whose 26-year-old son, Bruno, an engineer at the facility, was among the 231 people killed. More than 40 are still missing.
Four months on, the ripples of the disaster in the rural town of Brumadinho are being felt worldwide. From the potential threat from Brazil’s courts to emboldened regulators and sceptical institutional investors, Vale, the world’s largest producer of iron ore, is facing an unprecedented crisis that could transform the way mining is conducted.
The rupture in January has triggered a far-reaching criminal investigation, amid claims that Vale had been warned about the fragile state of the structure yet did nothing. It came just over three years after a similar disaster in the nearby Mariana village, which killed 19 and caused Brazil’s biggest environmental catastrophe.
For the rest of this article: https://www.afr.com/business/mining/fallout-from-dam-disaster-piles-up-against-vale-20190527-p51rgj