BRUMADINHO (Brazil), Jan 27 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Residents of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil paid homage to the 270 people killed one year
ago when a nearby dam burst, spewing millions of tons of mining waste over homes and farmland in one of the country’s worst industrial accidents.
Still in mourning for the people swept away by the tsunami of sludge, some
300 people — friends and relatives of the victims as well as emergency
personnel and local authorities — held an event to place the first stone in
a monument to honor the victims.
“I hope that those who are really to blame will be punished, because you
don’t play with people’s lives,” Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema said at the event.
At 12:28 pm Saturday, the exact time the dam owned by Brazilian mining giant Vale burst one year ago unleashing some 12 million cubic meters of mining tailings, a much larger crowd gathered at the Brumadinho town entrance to hold a minute of silence in memory of the victims.
Page-sized photographs of the victims in clear plastic sleeves were placed
on the ground and strung up on cables at the outdoor memorial.
Organizers released hundreds of white balloons, followed later by mourners releasing red balloons.
Earlier a group of people went to the same site and hung a large sign that
read “365 Days of Suffering and Impunity.”
The official death toll is 259, but firefighters are still picking through
the dried mud for the bodies of 11 people listed as missing but certainly
dead.
Pope Francis also weighed in, asking the faithful via his social media
accounts to pray for the “brothers and sisters who were buried” in the
mudslide. He also lamented “the polluting of the whole river basin.”
Brumadinho residents who were left homeless by the disaster were not the
only victims: farmers and fishermen in the basin of the Paraopeba and Alto
San Francisco rivers, where the sludge flowed to on its meandering trip to
the Atlantic Ocean, saw their livelihoods destroyed by widespread pollution.
Those rivers still show “deep scars” from the disaster, according to a
report released Thursday by the Brazilian environmental NGO SOS Mata
Atlantica.
The water quality is “bad or awful” in 20 of the 21 points on the rivers
that were studied, the NGO said.
Brumadinho, with a population of some 40,000, will never be the same,
despite nearly two billion reais in compensation that Vale was forced to pay.
On Tuesday, state prosecutors charged the ex-boss of Vale Fabio Schvartsman and 15 others with intentional homicide in the dam collapse.
Vale and its German auditor TUV SUD, which had certified the dam’s
stability, have been accused of environmental crimes.
Both Vale and Minas Gerais officials have since tightened security measures
for mining and implemented emergency evacuation plans in areas near the dams that are considered “at risk. ” The dam breach was caused by an accumulation of water and a lack of drainage, according to a report commissioned by Vale and published last month. — NNN-AGENCIES
