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Nathalia de Oliveira, an intern for Brazilian mining giant Vale in the city of Brumadinho, was talking on the phone with her husband when she saw a stampede of birds overhead and felt the ground shake.
When the 25-year-old mother of two turned around, she saw a wall of liquid dust coming from the opposite direction.
“God save me,” he said, according to his family. Then his phone crashed.
Oliveira, one of 270 people who died when a dam containing more than 11 million cubic meters (nearly 3 billion gallons) of mining tea collapsed on Jan. 25, 2019, releasing a sea of brown mud.
Five years later, rescuers are still searching for Oliveira and two other people whose remains have never been found.
Using heavy machinery, they dig up piles of hardened muck from around the now-defunct mine, then meticulously sift through it for signs of the missing and presumed dead.
“It’s agonizing,” said Oliveira’s cousin, Tania de Oliveira, 51.
“Day after day, year after year, and they still haven’t figured it out,” he told AFP, his voice breaking.
“We hope to give him a burial so he can rest. So that we can rest. “
– Bodies in dust –
Brazil was still recovering from another mining crisis — the November 2015 dam collapse at an iron ore mine jointly owned by Australia’s Vale and BHP — when tragedy struck.
The 2015 oil spill hit the town of Mariana, 125 kilometers (80 miles) from Brumadinho in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. It killed 19 other people and dumped 40 million cubic meters of poisonous sludge into the Doce River and the Atlantic Ocean. .
Brumadinho would prove even deadlier.
The dam at the Corrego do Feijao mine burst at 12:28 pm, just as workers were having lunch at the cafeteria.
It flooded 270 football fields with tailings from mineral processing.
Survivors described horrific scenes as the dust wave swept away everything in its path.
AFP journalists who visited the site have not forgotten the rescuers who recover the bodies mangled by the force of the dust and the constant hum of helicopters lifting the sick from the dust.
“It’s a scenario of general desolation,” the first rescuer who arrived, firefighter Filipe Rocha, told AFP.
– ‘Nobody paid’ –
Today, the mine has been closed, the gigantic brown smudge still a hive of activity, with bulldozers and mechanical sieves searching for the missing.
A railway bridge, half of which was torn off by dust, is a silent witness to the tragedy; Weeds grow on its cut tracks.
Little remains of the once-bustling neighborhoods around the Brumadinho mine, a town of another 40,000 people on the Iron Belt.
Joaquina de Oliveira, a 71-year-old housewife in the Parque da Cachoeira neighborhood, is among the few who stayed.
Most of her neighbors accepted bills from Vale to move out. Instead, he sued the company.
“I can’t leave,” he told AFP.
“The other residents who sued Vale had their homes damaged and looted. If I leave, the same thing will happen to me. “
Residents of the 26 affected municipalities say the mud has made their river, the Paraopeba, unfit for drinking, fishing and farming.
A 2020 study found excessive levels of heavy metals in the water.
It’s still unclear exactly what caused the collapse of the 43-year-old dam, which was dismantled in 2016.
A study published this month found that microscopic changes in the tailings layers, so small that they were detected by tracking, could have created so much built-up pressure that they ruptured the dam.
In 2021, Vale agreed to pay about 38 billion reais ($7 billion) in damages, in addition to environmental cleanup. The company says it has also reached individual agreements to pay another 3. 5 billion reais to the families of the victims and others affected. .
Prosecutors have charged former Vale chief executive Fabio Schvartsman and 15 others with intentional homicide, alleging that the company and German consultancy TUEV SUED, which audited the dam’s safety, colluded to conceal the risk.
Defense attorneys deny the accusations.
Tania de Oliveira says she and her circle of family members are still waiting for justice.
“No one paid for what they did. “
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