Dam collapse Brumadinho (écrit en anglais dans le cadre d'un cours)

« On the 25th of january 2019, an environmental disater occured in the large town of Brumadinho.

Brumadinho is located in the southern hemisphere.

It’s a city of South East Brazil situated in the Minas Gerais states, between Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia. The town got flooded by a tidal wave of mud and toxic waste.

This was caused by the collapse of a mining dam that was sitting above the town.

The incident killed about 259 people, distroyed homes and businesses, injured many people, had many environment damages such as pollution and destruction of habitats; and , it had economic consequences with many jobs loss. The dam collapsed because of corruption in the country.

This was a terrible tragedy but certainly not an accident. First of all we can see that the village underneath the dam was in a risky area.

This should not have been accepted by the authorities because they knew that , in 2015, a mining dam operated by Vale’s subsidiary, Samarco, collapsed in the town of Mariana and destroyed two nearby villages.

Vale had said that it would never happen again and that it was just an accident.

So people just don’t accept it anymore. We can also note the fact that the structure of the dam was not resistant, it looked solid but the dam was in fact liquid.

They were simply stacking diaper of waste when they extracted it.

There has been no investment in dam safety and it had no separate concrete or metal wall to hold back the content.

In addition to that,the instruments used were not adequate. Even more shocking, a review wrote by Vale before the accident, in september 2018, shows that they knew the collapse would happen.

They simply choose to calculate the cost of the damage instead of doing everything they could to avoid it. All those elements shows that Vale could have avoid the accident but chose the cheapest and more beneficial option instead of security, directly causing many deaths and environmental damages. As for Vale, the accident could also have been avoided if political powers had regulated the mining with more security mesures.

But it’s not as easy as it seems, the politic people from the town said they couldn’t have done anything.

They are not the one who give license or decides how Vale should mine.

« Our hand are tied » they said. Even if they could do it, closing the Vale mine would mean the end of the town.

Many habitants were working at the mine.

All the money of the town came from Vale.

Without Vale, there would be no job, no hospital, no school,… The town was simply dependent of Vale which means they couldn’t control it easily. More than impossibility of doing something, there was also problems of corruption making change even more complicate. As a conclusion we think that this kind of accident definitely shouldn’t happen. Economy, and capitalism especially, cause a lot of different problems .

Many accident such as this one could have been avoided if human life and ecology was considered more important than profit.

But unfortunately, for many, that’s not the case.

Some people consider that sacrifice need to be made for benefit.

Because of that, the inequalities between the rich and the poor people is growing and growing.

Those inequalities reinforce corruption and vice versa, making it a vicious circle.. »