Nine people are now confirmed dead and a further 19 remain unaccounted for as a slow-motion environmental catastrophe continues to unfold following the collapse of two mining dams in the mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Eight days after the town of Bento Rodrigues was swept away by 50 million cubic meters of toxic mud, a slow-moving tide of toxic iron-ore residue is oozing downriver, polluting the water supply of hundreds of thousands of residents as it makes its way to the ocean.
Brazil’s national water agency, ANA, has warned that the presence of arsenic, zinc, copper and mercury now present in the Rio Doce make the water untreatable for human consumption. Already, the lack of oxygen and high temperatures caused by the pollutants has killed off much of the aquatic life along a 500km stretch of the river.
Illustration: Mountain People
“It is a tragedy of enormous proportions,” Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) president Marilene Ramos said.
“We have thousands of hectares of protected areas destroyed and the total extinction of all the biodiversity along this stretch of the river,” she said.
The mine and dams are operated by Samarco Mineracao SA, a joint venture between the Anglo-Australian mining group BHP Billiton — the world’s largest mining company — and the Brazilian iron ore giant Vale. Shares in BHP Billiton — a FTSE-100 company and therefore a key holding of pension funds around the world — have been battered. Billions of US dollars have been wiped off the value of the company as its shares in the UK and Australia have slumped by an average of 14 percent.
For the company — which operates around the world, extracting and marketing a range of products from oil, gas, coal and iron ore to copper, silver and uranium — the dam burst comes as mining firms are under pressure. Commodity prices are at multi-year lows as a result of slowing demand from China. BHP Billiton’s UK shares, which hovered at about £8.77 yesterday, were changing hands at almost £20 only 16 months earlier.
On Thursday last week, IBAMA announced a preliminary fine of 250 million Brazilian real (US$66 million) for Samarco, but the final cost — the financial and reputational damage — could be much higher.
Ramos said that the fine did not include the cost of the cleanup operation, lawsuits and compensation payments. The Brazilian financial magazine Exame, quoting an anonymous government source, said the total cost was likely to amount to between 5 billion real and 10 billion real.
There are also operational losses: The Minas Gerais mine produced more than 5 percent of BHP Billiton’s iron ore output and about 3 percent of the group’s earnings. Samarco has now also been stripped of its mining license.
BHP Billiton was formed in 2001, when Australia’s Broken Hill Proprietary merged with South Africa’s Billiton. By Thursday last week, the firm and its partner, Vale, had sent senior management to see the damage caused and promised an emergency fund — expected to be about US$100 million — but already there are allegations that there had been warnings about the design of the dam and its safety.
Asked whether she still had confidence in Brazilian mining regulations, Ramos said she believed safety measures needed to be revised in the wake of the disaster.
“It cannot be right that in the last 12 years we have had five accidents in the state of Minas Gerais alone,” she said.
Early next week, the mudslide is expected to reach the Atlantic Ocean, with a potentially devastating impact on fishing communities along the coast of the state of Espirito Santo.
On a visit to the affected region, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Thursday last week described the incident as “possibly the biggest environmental disaster to have impacted one of the major regions of our country.”
She compared the scale of the damage to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and laid the blame squarely on Samarco.
“We are committed in the first place to finding those who are responsible,” Rousseff said.
“Who is responsible? A private business, Samarco — a big business that has Vale and BHP Billiton as partners,” she said.
Also on Thursday last week, Brazilian Deputy Attorney General Sandra Cureau said that the companies should be subject to “exemplary punishment” given their “negligence” over the accident.
“Vale and BHP were totally careless in preventing this,” she said. “They did not show a plan of action in case of disaster. They had no alarm system in place.”
At a news conference on Wednesday last week, BHP Billiton chief executive officer Andrew Mackenzie and Vale chief executive officer Murilo Ferreira offered apologies for the disaster and insisted they would honor their obligations as joint owners.
However, they offered no comments on reports that Vale had diverted extra water from another mine to the tailings pond behind the dam in the weeks preceding its collapse.
The government itself has come under criticism for the sluggish nature of its response. Critics say it took Rousseff one week to visit the region, while the conservative daily Folha de Sao Paulo said that the state body responsible for monitoring the nation’s dams, the DNPM, checked each of them only once every four years.
Despite the importance of mining to the Brazilian economy, the DNPM only has 220 inspectors charged with monitoring 27,293 sites nationwide. Last year, three workers were killed at a dam near the area of last week’s accident.
In 2012, thousands of residents of the town of Campo dos Goytacazes were forced to flee their homes as water starting leaking through a dam. Another breakage at a dam in the northeastern state of Piaui, in 2009, resulted in the deaths of 24 people.
Maurico Guetta, a lawyer for the environmental non-governmental organizaton Instituto Socioambiental, described the close links between the government and the mining industry in a blog post for the organization: “Could it be that this tragedy would bring any lessons for our governors and legislators? Unfortunately, there seems to be no sign of that.”
Vale was one of the major corporate donors to both Rousseff and the main opposition candidate, Aecio Neves, in last year’s presidential elections. Minas Gerais Governor Fernando Pimentel, who is another beneficiary of Vale campaign donations, held his first news conference in the wake of the tragedy at Samarco headquarters.
At present, the Brazilian Congress is debating a law that would diminish environmental regulation for “strategic infrastructure projects in the national interest,” including mining.
Meanwhile, in Governador Valadares, a town of 200,000 people about 330km from the site of the original accident, local authorities are bringing in emergency water supplies for hospitals and schools from up to 100km away.
For other residents, stockpiles of drinking water are running low.
“The town’s three universities have closed and all the students have all gone home,” said Nagel Madeiros, a city government official. “Many people are leaving.”
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.