Mining Giant on Trial

Monday October 21st and the court case has started in London. In the dock, the mining giant BHP, that along with Valé are the majority shareholders in Samarco, the firm responsible for the ‘maintenance’, or rather lack of it, that led to the devastating collapse of the Mariana Fundão Dam nine years ago. The lawyers Goodhead are suing BHP for £36 billion on behalf of 620,000 victims and two thousand businesses, making it one of the biggest corporate trials in history. For the international mining corporations, it was an unfortunate, unforeseen accident due to excessive rainfall. For the families and communities that lost everything, it is a ‘crime-disaster’ that continues to haunt the state of Minas, for it has implications for the future that go beyond the recent tragedies. There are three principal ways to build dams to contain toxic waste. The cheapest is naturally enough the most unstable, little more than piled up compacted rock and earth. The most secure and expensive, a system of piled foundations and interlocking triangulated sections. You can guess which system was used in the dams that collapsed. What is so terrifying is not just that the companies knew of their structural instability, but it is estimated that there are another fifty unstable dams across Minas Gerais. The potential for catastrophe is unimaginable. It is a sunny day as I drive out from the historic town centre of Mariana in the direction of Bento Rodrigues, the first village to be inundated by the deadly chemical tsunami. Abandoned homesteads, broken bus stops, and ghost schools. Behind the barbed wire fences, ‘Keep out’ signs erected by the mining companies are graffitied with crucifixes and the words ‘assassin’ and ‘killer’. Samarco’s plaque is particularly extraordinary in its grotesque irony; “Environmental infractions are crimes, subject to penalties.”