This series about the Mariana dam collapse was originally published by Brio, in Portuguese. It was translated by Gustavo Ribeiro and edited by Christine Bootes
Chapter 5: A Tragedy In Many Acts
The days off given by Samarco weren’t enough for Renato, the truck driver at the dam, to forget what he had witnessed on November 5. He was still recovering from the funeral of a coworker of his who wasn’t as lucky to make it out alive. In the company Renato worked for, there were seven casualties – but Renato was skeptical of the official data given by Samarco and the authorities.
One of his fellow drivers was under psychological treatment. He was supposed to be in the lower part of the dam that November 5, but a last-minute change resulted in the company sending another worker in his place – a 41-year-old man who died in the collapse, leaving behind a devastated family. The surviving driver, who escaped death by chance, was struggling with guilt. And with all of these thoughts circling around in his head, Renato had to put on his boots and helmet and start work again. He wanted desperately to leave these memories behind him, but his uniform was a constant reminder of the tragedy.
Back at the dam, workers were greeted by a crisis committee formed by safety engineers and experts. “The company insists that the collapse was just bad luck, and that the safety of the premises is assured,” said a spokesperson for Samarco. The employees raise their eyebrows and look at each other. “We have now installed several sensors capable of detecting any signs of hazard,” the man continued, while Renato and his coworkers watched the seminar on safety and escape routes. Signs indicating emergency exists were installed, but Renato has to wonder: why wasn’t this done before?
After the seminar, the time came to go to the site of the dam collapse. Renato has no excuse to avoid going, as he found out that his new job will be to transport rocks to reinforce the dike in the Germano dam. Nobody wanted to return to the disaster, but representatives from Samarco reassured them that the new sensors would sound the moment something was out of order, and instructed them to review their chart on emergency actions.
Although the men say that the dam is being monitored, Renato has not seen a single one at the site of the collapse – only low-level employees are sent. While he protested being sent down there, he was also in a precarious situation because he didn’t want to risk losing his job. Like so many others, he was torn between his outrage about the disaster, and his dependency on the salary.
Renato had doubts about what Samarco had told its employees. It had been awhile since he first began to have second thoughts about the safety of Fundão and Germano, despite their good reputation within the mining business. After the collapse, not even high-profile employees of Samarco felt that safety was assured. One had even warned his friends to stay far from the dam, just in case.
Fear became a reality, as Germano – the dam where Renato transported rocks – still threatened to collapse. And if it were to do so, the mud would follow the same path as the residue of Fundão, further increasing the devastation to the region.
On November 30, local authorities – and Samarco – called for the preventive evacuation of the Camargos district. The same could have been done in Barra Longa, where 155 houses were destroyed in twelve hours.
A task force was created to investigate the causes of the accident. Its purpose was to determine whether or not the collapse was the result of negligence, and moreover, to punish whoever was responsible for the disaster. State Prosecutor Carlos Eduardo Ferreira Pinto was appointed as the task force coordinator – the same prosecutor who had signed the report stipulating conditions for the renewal of Samarco’s license for the Fundão dam, and the same who would later refrain from voting in the Environmental Council. “The State Prosecution Office chose to abstain because we had several doubts...
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