Months After Brumadinho, Second g Dam at Risk of Collapse
Emily Pollock posted on March 28, 2019 |
The Brumadinho collapse killed at least two hundred people and poisoned nearby drinking water with mine tailings. An audit has shown that another nearby dam is at risk of collapsing as well. (Image courtesy of CTV News.)
Two months after a deadly dam collapse in Brazil, mining company Vale says that another one of its upstream tailing dams is on the verge of falling apart, and that the area surrounding it has been evacuated.
On January 25, a tailing dam at Vale’s Córrego do Feijão mine burst, letting loose a torrent of toxic mud filled with discarded mine tailings. The flood killed at least 206 people, making it Brazil’s largest environmental disaster. Now, the government has ordered the city of Barao de Cocais evacuated after a risk evaluation from an independent auditor put one of the company’s dams there at the highest possible level of collapse risk.
The evacuation is another blow to the embattled upstream tailing dam, a common mining structure that has been under public scrutiny since the Brumadinho collapse. Tailing ponds are “lakes” of mud, water and ground-up mining waste that allow miners to separate out the water from the solid waste. They are contained by tailing dams that are built higher as the “water” level in the lake rises, typically made from compacted dirt. “Upstream” tailing dams are built by piling more earth on top…