Scott Ludlam - It was a disaster on an almost inconceivable scale, then the world moved on

By Dilip -
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:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/03/it-was-a-disaster-on-an-almost-inconceivable-scale-then-the-world-moved-on



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