Brazilian court clears BHP, Vale and Samarco of charges in 2015 dam disaster
A court in Belo Horizonte ruled that state prosecutors failed to prove that "individual actions" directly contributed to the collapse of the dam.
Vale on Wednesday began working on another of the five upstream tailing dams it expects to eliminate in 2022 as a safety measure to prevent collapses.
The new effort will focus on eliminating a dike from its Barragem 5 dam at the Aguas Claras mine, located in the Minas Gerais city of Nova Lima, the company told Reuters.
Upstream structures pose greater risks of collapse, and Vale plans to eliminate 30 of them by 2035. The mining giant said 40% of the goal is expected to be reached by year-end 2022, and 90% by 2029.
The plans follow a deadly 2019 disaster, when a structure collapsed in the city of Brumadinho, killing 270 people.
“Eliminating all upstream dams is one of the pillars of Vale’s principles of guaranteeing that collapses such as the one in Brumadinho will not be repeated,” the firm said in a statement.
The Barragem 5 dike has not received tailings since 2000 and is one of 23 structures that will be made to comply with current federal and state safety regulations for dams.
(By Nayara Figueiredo and Gabriel Araujo; Editing by Jason Neely)
Comments
Susanne Chandler
When are mining companies going to realise that they can’t continue using tailings dams, that sudden extreme weather events make them impracticable, and lethal to people and ecosystems alike? And that commodities prices must rise in line with scarcity of finite minerals, and that urban mining , and recycling is paramount? Also that all existing tailings Dams are at once a source of minerals and an expensive maintenance problem and need to be emptied, reused and deconstructed?