CONGONHAS, Brazil— Marta Maia has not slept properly for a year. From her bedroom window, the 60-year-old can see the vast mine-waste dam that looms over this town in southeast Brazil, built just half a mile from her house.
It is one of 816 mining dams across the country causing alarm since a similar structure in the nearby town of Brumadinho collapsed a year ago, killing 270 people.
“The nights are the worst,” said Mrs. Maia. “I look at the dam and think about what would happen if it collapsed. We wouldn’t even have time to think—the mud would already have buried us, as well as my children, my grandchildren, my neighbors.”
Brazil’s mining regulator, ANM, said the 280-foot dam here in Congonhas doesn’t pose enough of a danger to warrant evacuations and isn’t one of the four Brazilian dams at “imminent risk.”
But ANM’s director, Eduardo Leão, has said the regulator is both underfunded and understaffed. Under Brazil regulations, it is up to a dam’s owner to detect and report safety problems, and to select and pay for safety auditors.
Brazilian steelmaker CSN, which owns the dam, says it has been certified as safe by external inspectors it hired.
Heavy rains over the past few days in Brazil’s mining state of Minas Gerais put dams on alert, and triggered unrelated landslides that have so far led to at least 45 deaths, according to local authorities.
All that brings little comfort to the 2,500 people living in neighborhoods directly beneath it: Like many others across Minas Gerais state, they have lost faith in industry or government to protect them. The dam owned by mining giant Vale SA that ruptured in Brumadinho on Jan. 25, 2019, was certified as stable by the German inspection company TÜV SÜD only months before it gave way.
Police and prosecutors, who charged Vale’s former CEO and 15 others with homicide last week over the collapse, have accused the miner and TÜV SÜD of colluding to falsify the audits.
“I trust only in God now, no one else,” said Mrs. Maia. Her nephew, a Vale employee, was killed in the tragedy 50 miles away in Brumadinho, where victims’ families marked the first anniversary of the disaster last Saturday.
Mrs. Maia said she and her husband now spend almost half of their monthly income on tranquilizers, sleeping pills and other medication. Relatives in other cities have stopped coming to visit.
Here in Congonhas, the Casa de Pedra (“Stone House”) dam holds 17 billion gallons of mining waste—almost six times the capacity of the Brumadinho dam. It is one of the largest mine-waste dams in an urban area in Latin America. The dam sits about 2 miles from the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, a Baroque-style church listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
After the Brumadinho tragedy, state legislators ruled that no more dams be built within 6 miles of residential areas. Miners must also dismantle dams constructed by the most dangerous “upstream” method that was used in Brumadinho, whereby the structure’s wall is built up in step-stair fashion, often from the mine waste itself.
The rule doesn’t apply to Casa de Pedra, constructed using the “downstream” method—also an earthen structure but with a thicker and more vertical wall that engineers generally consider safer.
Nevertheless, Congonhas’s mayor shut a school and day-care center near the dam last February as a precaution. State prosecutors have also filed a lawsuit urging the courts to force CSN to pay for the relocation of families.
“They say it would take 30 seconds for the mud to reach us,” said Rita Resende, a 32-year-old mother of seven living next to the now-empty school.
The risk of collapse is real, prosecutors say. During visits in 2013 and 2017, state inspectors identified erosion and drainage problems in the structure—the same issues that led to the Brumadinho breach.
Casa de Pedra also sits in front of two other dams in CSN’s iron ore mine, B4 and B5, where auditors have warned of erosion and a risk of overflow. In 2017, labor ministry officials ordered the suspension of Casa de Pedra’s activities. CSN complied with officials’ demands to shore up the structure, but continued operations.
The steelmaker, which declined to comment for this article, has previously said its dam is stable and poses no risk to the town.
Casa de Pedra was last certified as stable by auditors hired by its owner in September—one of the biannual inspections required by Brazilian regulation. Yet even when done correctly, these audits only serve as a snapshot of the dam’s condition at that moment, engineering experts said. Heavy rainfall, or seismic movements, can suddenly alter its structure.
So when a 3.2 magnitude earthquake hit this town one evening in November—a tremor big enough for televisions to fall off walls—locals panicked.
“Everyone ran out of the house in despair,” said Maria Soraia Oliveira, 57, who lives with her children and grandchildren just a short walk from Mrs. Maia’s home.
CSN said the dam wasn’t damaged. ANM, the regulator, sent inspectors to the site the following morning but didn’t detect any problems.
“If there is no risk, then why did they come check?” said Nelis Resende, 40, adding that many of his neighbors are afraid to complain about the dam because they work at the mine or have relatives who do.
The dam’s presence has made life harder, residents say. House prices have fallen, meaning that many residents who are willing to uproot their families have no financial option but to stay. “Everyone looking to rent here says the same thing: I don’t want anything near the dam,” said Andressa Ruas, an employee of a local real estate agency, whose brother-in-law was killed in Brumadinho.
William Garcia Pinto Coelho, a lead state prosecutor in the Brumadinho case, said Vale and TÜV SÜD carry much of the blame for the panic now gripping the region.
TÜV SÜD certified the Brumadinho structure as safe despite knowing about its dangers for fear of losing business with Vale, which pressured contractors into signing off on its riskiest dams, prosecutors said.
“The illicit collusion between Vale and TÜV SÜD corrupted the Brazilian model for the certification of dams, which has created a profound crisis of confidence and generalized sense of insecurity about dams among the population,” said Mr. Coelho.
Vale said it wasn’t aware of any critical or imminent risk at the Brumadinho site. TÜV SÜD didn’t comment on the charges, but said it is cooperating with the authorities.
The patience of Minas Gerais’s residents, who have long welcomed the prosperity that miners bring to this region, now seems to be running out. The Brumadinho tragedy came only three years after another dam Vale jointly owned nearby also collapsed, killing 19. Some Vale workers say they now avoid wearing their uniforms outside the mines for fear of attacks.
In Brumadinho, tens of people, mostly women, have attempted suicide over the past year as rescue workers continue digging for the remains of the last 11 victims.
Before the collapse, internal Vale documents obtained by authorities and made public last week show the miner had already calculated the economic cost to the company if the Brumadinho dam were to rupture. It estimated it would have to pay $2.6 million in damages for every life lost, detailing the potential cost of victims’ belongings based on their social class—everything from their cars to the likely value of their vacuum cleaners and beds.
“It’s time these companies stopped chasing profits,” said Mrs. Maia. “They need to start valuing human life.”
Write to Luciana Magalhaes at Luciana.Magalhaes@wsj.com and Samantha Pearson at samantha.pearson@wsj.com
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/residents-near-brazils-mine-dams-live-in-fear-11580306968
2020-01-29 14:09:00Z
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