Five years on, Brumadinho still scarred by dam disaster

“I was having lunch when my supervisor said that one of the dams in Brumadinho had just collapsed. I looked on my phone and saw videos of friends of people running and mud coming down the hill. I immediately took an Uber up there. In the meantime, I tried to call people I knew, and I was able to talk to some of them, but most of the phones were out of range or just rang out, like my cousin’s, who didn’t make it.

“When I arrived, I saw that my house was full of cracks. The mud was flowing 300 meters away. I saw people running with the clothes on their backs, half-naked. I was one of the first volunteers to go to where the mud was flowing. When we arrived, after an hour and a half of walking through a dense forest, we were greeted by horrific scenes that traumatize me to this day. Me, my wife, and my children are still under psychiatric treatment to help us sleep at night. I developed heart problems and later discovered that we have heavy metal poisoning, apparently because of the mud.”

This is the story of Silas Viário, a resident of the town of Brumadinho and a former employee of Vale, Brazil’s largest mining company and a world leader in iron ore production. 

He was working in a neighboring town the day one of Vale’s Brumadinho dams collapsed, burying homes, businesses, and a train station in a sea of 12 million cubic meters of mud.  

Of the 272 dead, two were still in their mothers’ wombs.

Silas lost two close relatives in the Brumadinho dam collapse: his aunt, and a cousin who worked at the mine. He tells The Brazilian Report that he left his job at Vale because he feared a tragedy might occur, just like it did in Mariana, a city 125 kilometers away, where another dam had collapsed a few years earlier, causing one of the biggest environmental disasters in Brazil’s history.

On January 25, 2019, at 12:28 pm, the history of the small town in southeastern Brazil was cut in two. The survivors will never be the...