A Dam Collapse Foretold in Brazil
João Vítor Xavier was afraid history was going to repeat itself. But he didn’t expect it to happen when it did. A legislator in Brazil’s mineral-rich Minas Gerais state, Xavier was on vacation on Jan. 25, having lunch with Duarte Gonçalves Júnior, the mayor of a town called Mariana. In November 2015, Mariana was the town most devastated by the collapse of a so-called upstream dam, which holds back oceans of muddy waste produced by mines. Nineteen people were killed, and one entire neighborhood was wiped out. At dinner with the mayor the night before, he had rehashed his failed campaign to ban the structures, which are widely considered dangerous and obsolete, hold the big mining companies who owned them more accountable for damages, and prevent future catastrophes. But as their lunch got under way, Xavier received a text. He leaned over to Gonçalves and said, “There’s been a tragedy. It looks even worse than yours.” The news was about Brumadinho, just 71 miles away. The two men rushed over and found unspeakable destruction.
The collapsed dam at Brumadinho was owned by Vale SA, the world’s largest iron ore miner. The company was also the co-owner of the dam that wrecked Mariana. Vale isn’t the only owner of mines with such dams; Brazil has hundreds of them, most of them in Xavier’s state. But these two failures are the largest ever in the country.
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