Scott Ludlam - It was a disaster on an almost inconceivable scale, then the world moved on
The scale of what
happened here begins to settle in as we pick our way through the ghost town. On
the first floor of what used to be a school, more than three metres above
ground level, desks and chairs poke out of caked mud at crazy angles. Hundreds
of books are set into the crust, scattered amidst broken glass. Whatever
happened here happened fast.
This is not the site
of a natural disaster. This is Paracatu in south-eastern Brazil, a riverside
town destroyed by BHP and Vale three years ago. That would be the BHP headquartered
safely ten time zones away in Melbourne, Australia. Where we are standing
is a few dozen kilometres from a collapsed iron ore mine tailings dam which
disgorged up to 34 million cubic metres of mining waste into
the environment in November 2015. The disaster is known as the Samarco dam
collapse – after the company which is a joint venture between BHP and Vale.
The torrent of
fine-grained mud killed nineteen people, wiped several townships off the map,
polluted the entire stretch of the river, and then destroyed the fishing
grounds on either side of the river mouth 633km downstream. The companies claimed
the mud was composed only of crushed iron ore residues and harmless silicates.
A UN report immediately contradicted
this information, bearing out residents’ concerns that the slurry contained
toxic heavy metals and other chemicals. The truth remains contested even today,
with representatives of the impacted communities unable to access reliable
information about levels of toxins in the mud.
It was a disaster on
an almost inconceivable scale, receiving global coverage at the time. One video of the township of
Bento Rodrigues being inundated has been watched 1.7 million times. But
attention fades fast in an information-saturated world – much faster than the
destructive impacts... read more:
