How the victims of a deadly dam collapse are still fighting for justice eight years on
On November 5, 2015, the Mariana Dam collapsed in Minas Gerais, Brazil, sending 50 million cubic metres of toxic waste barrelling towards small villages.
The incident killed 19 people and devastated indigenous communities.
People lost their homes, families and livelihoods to the onslaught of toxic mud after Fundão dam ruptured, releasing iron ore waste from a nearby mine into the vital Doce River.
The mine was owned by Anglo-Australian company BHP, and was operating under their subsidiary, Samarco.
More than 700,000 plaintiffs are being represented by Pogust Goodhead law firm against BHP in UK courts.
They include victims, Brazilian municipalities, Indigenous communities, and churches.
Now, nearly 10 years on from the disaster, survivors have shared their stories as they still fight for justice from the mining company for the disaster that ruined their lives.
Pamela Isabel
Pamela was rushing to get to her classes on time on November 5, 2013. She was three months pregnant, living with her husband, Wesley, and her two children, Emanuele , 5, and Nicholas, 3.
She told Metro.co.uk: ‘I usually gave quick goodbye kisses to everyone in the house – my husband, Nicholas and Emanuele.
‘That day I gave a quick kiss to everyone, and Emanuele said, “Hey Mommy, kiss me properly!” I came back, gave her a little kiss again and left for school.
‘You never know when the last time you’re going to see someone is.’
The dam collapsed while she was in class. The noise was ‘excruciating’, Pamela said, like heavy machinery grinding together at once.
Unable to reach her family the first night after the disaster, Pamela slept on top of a hill, eating vegetable soup with others waiting to hear from their loved ones.
‘I was three months pregnant, I just wanted to cry. I didn’t know where my kids were,’ she said.
She was later reunited with her husband and son, Nicholas. Wesley told her how when the mudslide began, he rushed to their neighbour’s house, which was more structurally sound.
But the mud was too strong, and the house was beginning to crumble around them – Wesley didn’t have a choice. He was holding Emanuele and Nicholas, and said if he didn’t let them go, he knew they would all three die together. Letting go of his children was the only way he thought they could survive.
For days, Pamela and Wesley held out hope that Emanuele would be found. Nicholas had been discovered a few days earlier, hiding in a car, naked and crying. He was ill from having swallowed a lot of the toxic mud.
Pamela said: ‘The smell of the mud impregnated you. It was so hard to get out of your clothes and your body, it was just rotten.’
Five days after the dam collapse, Emanuele’s little body was discovered seven and a half miles from the home she had been in with her father and brother. When Pamela was told Emanuele had not survived, she collapsed.
Wiping away tears, Pamela explained: ‘I felt like the ground was opening right under me. I cried and cried. It was the worst day ever.
‘When they buried her little coffin, it was like a piece of my heart died. I don’t wish that pain on anyone else.’
For a while after the disaster, Pamela and her family were provided a home and a credit card from BHP for small necessities.
After losing Emanuele, they were also given psychological help – but the help dried up almost as quickly as the mud.
As the years passed, Wesley fell into drug use and drinking to cope with the loss of their daughter. He’s since been in and out of prison, having never ‘gotten over Emanuele’s death’.
Even though Pamela said she has a lot of hope for the lawsuit going forth in UK courts, she said money won’t bring back Emanuele.
Smiling through her tears, she said: ‘Emanuele used to make everyone smile. Whenever I do something we used to do together, like my hair or nails, I really miss her. She was my little companion.’
Jonathan Knowles
Yorkshireman Jonathan Knowles packed up his belongings and moved to Brazil with his wife, Sheila, who he met in Harrogate.
Jonathan arrived in a community that was experiencing a housing boom, and found success in selling imported water valves for those experiencing price gouging from water companies.
On November 5, he heard rumours of a dam collapse further upstream from the river he and his family lived nearby. He told Metro.co.uk that he rushed to fill up containers with water in case their supply was cut off.
After the collapse, Jonathan recalled how the river stopped running. He said: ‘It was absolutely biblical. It was completely flat and it was covered from one side to the other in dead fish.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t even know that you can have that many fish. Then on the fourth day, they all just started to rot.’
As the mud slowly dried in the weeks after November 5, fine silt was whipped up in the wind – spreading toxic metal waste through the air that ‘glimmered’.
‘As cars and lorries went past, the silt got tracked in the tires. And you could see it sparkle in the air’, he added.
‘Some people had taken magnets and put them in a plastic bag, if you dropped it on the silt, you could lift great metal clumps out of the dirt.
‘That’s how much metal was in there.’
The disaster decimated Jonathan’s company and livelihood – forcing him to move his young son and wife back to the UK. He said he welcomes the lawsuit.
‘There should be no need for Britain to get involved but Brazil is corrupt so it has to be done, and I’m glad it is.’
Environmental impact
Indigenous communities were some of the hardest hit communities from the disaster, which sent toxic mining waste, including heavy metals, arsenic, mercury nickel and aluminium into the River Doce.
After it made its way into the river, it emptied into the Atlantic Ocean, 434 miles downstream.
Masses of fish were left dead due to poisoning from the mud, as Jonathan recalled – a total of 29,000 were collected by Brazilian federal police.
Hundreds of birds also died from starvation, as their main food supply – the fish – were now no more.
The Wilson Centre wrote in a report: ‘80 percent of the native vegetation located near the tributaries and main channel of the Doce River was destroyed, leaving the river with only 13 percent of the Atlantic forest’s original vegetation.’
It will take one or two decades for the river to recover, scientists say – if it recovers at all.
Communities are still suffering.
The Krenak Tribe is an indigeneous group which believes the waters of the Doce to be sacred. Children used to be baptised in the water and their diet consisted of fish caught from the river.
Krenak leader Rondon Felix Viana told The Guardian: ‘We had to move further away from the river because of a putrid, fetid smell. We can’t bathe or swim in the river because people get skin rashes.
‘It was a happy life, we were together and united … Our life was peaceful until the mud came and destroyed everything.’
What’s next?
The case being brought against BHP on behalf of the victims from the Mariana Dam disaster is the largest opt-in class action in English legal history.
Tom Goodhead, CEO of Pogust Goodhead, said: ‘BHP is responsible for the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history. The Mariana Dam collapse obliterated everything in its path, burying villages in mud, displacing thousands of people and destroying farms, fish stocks and livelihoods.
‘Pamela and Jonathan are just two of the nearly 700,000 victims Pogust Goodhead represents. This disaster is a huge failure of corporate governance. By holding those who do harm accountable, we are sending a clear message that large corporations cannot evade justice any longer.
‘We hope such cases will shift the balance of power away from big corporations and protect the people affected by their decisions, ensuring that tragedies like the Mariana Dam collapse never happen again.’
A spokesperson for BHP told Metro.co.uk: ‘BHP will continue to defend the UK action and denies the claims in their entirety. The next material hearing in this case will not take place until October this year and then it will only deal with certain aspects of alleged liability – it will not consider any level of potential compensation claim.
‘BHP Brasil continues to work closely with Samarco and Vale to support the ongoing remediation process in Brazil via The Renova Foundation.
‘Renova has already disbursed more than £5.4bn in reparation actions, approximately 50% of which was paid directly to the people affected through individual compensation – the amounted to payments to more than 430,000 people. In total, more than 200,000 claimants in the UK action have already received payments in Brazil.’
‘The money won’t bring back Emanuele’, Pamela said.
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