The river is dying': the vast ecological cost of Brazil's
mining disasters
Brazil
Water resources are tapped with often reckless abandon and
poor regulation. And it looks set to go on under new president
Jonathan Watts Global environment editor
Tue 29 Jan 2019 08.00 GMT Last modified on Tue 29 Jan 2019
08.02 GMT
The Brazilian government has pledged to ease environmental
licensing regulations just days after the deadliest mining disaster in decades
prompted calls for tougher controls and stricter punishments for ecological
crimes.
The torrent of mud and iron ore tailings that engulfed the
community of Brumadinho on Friday continues to inflict a toll on residents,
river systems and freshwater species.
Rescue teams had by Monday recovered 60 bodies near the
site, which is operated by Vale, one of the world’s biggest mining companies,
but hundreds of people are still missing. Many were eating lunch or resting in
a hotel when the tailings dam collapsed and swept them away in a tide of orange
sludge.
It is the second such calamity to strike a Vale facility in
the state of Minas Gerais in less than four years. In 2015, 19 people were
killed when a tailings dam burst at an iron ore mine in Mariana that the Brazilian
company co-owned with the London-listed BHP Group.
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The amount of slurry this time is 75% lower, at 13 million
cubic metres, but now, as then, the ecological damage is spreading far beyond
the immediate area and could potentially persist for many years with grave
consequences for local communities, wildlife and the national economy.
Over the weekend, TV and social networks were filled with
images of emergency workers in helicopters trying to pull people out of the
mud. Now many posts have switched to the impact on fish, frogs and other
freshwater species.
“Rio Paraopeba has started to die,” noted one grim tweet
with a video clip of oxygen-deprived fish leaping out of the turbid water and
flapping their last on the land.
The level of toxicity in the tailings is not yet clear, but
iron oxide can choke river sand and poison the surrounding vegetation. It can
also compact the soil, preventing new growth of plants on land. Three years
after the previous disaster, water from the affected Doce River is still
legally unfit for human consumption in 90% of monitoring stations.
A second and bigger impact is the amplification by previous
manmade environmental problems. The torrent of water stirred up the heavy
metals buried in the sediment on the bottom of the river. This is a huge
problem in the state of Minas Gerais, which has a long history of poorly
regulated resource extraction, according to the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is working on a series of reports on the
ecological impact of the previous tailings dam collapse in Mariana.
The immediate threat is to the 280km (174 miles) of
Paraopeba River. Vale insists the problem will not spread to the São Francisco
basin, but conservationists remain concerned. In this region, 64% of fish
species are found nowhere else on Earth, according to the IUCN. Even before the
contamination, 10% were already classified as vulnerable, including
Simpsonichthys picturatus and Brycon orthotaenia. January is the end of the
spawning season, which means the deluge affected fry and small fish in
important species for fisheries, such as croakers, curimbatás and surubins.
The slurry is expected to reach the hydropower plant at Retiro
Baixo by Thursday, where the authorities hope it can be controlled in the
reservoir without spreading down to the estuary and into the ocean, as happened
in the case of the Mariana disaster. Hydropower generation and water supplies
are likely to be affected for years.
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The costs have yet to be calculated. After the previous
calamity, Vale and Billiton paid $1bn into land and river recuperation efforts
and more in an out-of-court settlement to affected communities. Fishing is
still prohibited so stocks can recover and a dam remains disrupted. A separate
lawsuit in now under way in UK courts.
Campaigners say it is essential to tighten regulations and
punish those involved. “Good environmental regulation isn’t about adding costs
to development, it’s about safeguarding people and avoiding massive clean-up
costs like the ones we are now seeing,” said Stewart Maginnis, the director of
the nature-based solutions group in the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature.
Brazil has the most abundant water resources in the world,
but they are tapped with often reckless abandon and inadequate regulation. Less
than one in five of the country’s 24,092 dams come under the supervision of the
2010 dam safety law, 42 are unauthorised and 570 have no responsible operator,
according to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper. With a mere 154 inspectors for
such a vast country, only 3% of Brazil’s dams were inspected last year, it
said.
The problems date back decades, but the risks look set to
grow. The new administration of the president, Jair Bolsonaro, has neutered the
environment ministry and pledged to ease the licensing system for new projects.
Despite the latest calamity, Augusto Heleno, the head of the
national security office, insisted the fast-track approval process would go
ahead. “Making the process more flexible means having very strict rules, but
allowing certain works that depend on licensing to happen. It does not mean
loosening environmental licensing. On the contrary, licensing has to be done
well, but it can not be delayed without fair grounds,” he said.
Campaigners say this should now be unthinkable. “It would be
offensive to victims of Mariana and Brumadinho if they fulfil that promise,”
said Carlos Rittl, who heads the Climate Observatory umbrella group of
environmental NGOs.
Environmental crimes are often punished with small fines
that often go unpaid. As a result, campaigners say transgressions build into
“time-bombs” that can explode, as was the case in Brumadinho. To avoid this,
they say those responsible should be imprisoned.
“This cannot be called an ‘accident’ under any
circumstances,” said Malu Ribeiro, the founder of the NGO SOS Mata Atlantica.
“Such environmental crimes should be punished with the legal rigour that
society expects.”
Vale’s chief executive, Fabio Schvartsman, said in a
television interview on Sunday that he did everything the law required. “I’m
not a mining technician,” he said. “I followed the technicians’ advice and you
see what happened. It didn’t work. We are 100% within all the standards, and
that didn’t do it.”
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