How the worst disaster in Brazilian history happened

This series about the Mariana disaster was originally published by Brio, in Portuguese. It was translated by Gustavo Ribeiro and edited by Christine Bootes

Chapter 1: Shaking Ground

Renato was happy. He had just found a new job as a truck driver for a contractor under Samarco. A joint venture between the Brazilian Vale and the Anglo-Australian firm BHP Billiton, Samarco is one of Brazil’s largest and most famous mining companies. He had heard that it was a different company. This wasn’t one of those mining sites where you would go, not knowing for sure if you would come back in one piece. Not anymore. Samarco was different, said his colleagues.

Samarco, after all, is Brazil’s 10^th biggest exporter. They count among their staff 3,000 direct employees and 3,500 indirect – Renato was one of these indirect employees. He would work at the Germano unit, situated between the historic cities of Mariana and Ouro Preto, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. The Germano unit is formed by numerous open-air mines, where iron ore is extracted. In these mines, water is added to the iron ore which then becomes a thick pulp that will travel through 400 kilometers of slurry pipes to the coastal state of Espírito Santo. The pulp deemed not good enough to get sent through the pipelines is sent instead to the dams.

Renato’s mission was to drive a truck loaded with iron ore residue to two Samarco dams, Germano and Fundão. These two gigantic, artificial lakes don’t have water, but instead hold a muddy soup-like blend of water, dirt, sand and iron ore residue. He would be paid roughly USD 600 per month for the job.

The morning of November 5, 2015, began like any other. Renato woke at 5:30 in the morning, and by 7 am he was already at the wheel of his truck. It was around 11 am when Renato felt the land under his feet shake. He checked the three radio frequencies used by his company but heard no warnings for anything out of the ordinary. Weird, he thought to himself. As he looked around at his surroundings, nothing stood out. The only sight on the horizon was the barren hills where the mines were located.

Renato’s journey between the cities continued, hearing the usual blasts in the distance from explosives to help along the extraction of the ore from the mountain. But at 1 pm, just after his lunch break, Renato felt another a tremor. Still, there was no alert on the company radio. It wasn’t until 3:30 pm, four and a half hours after he first felt the ground shake, that Renato overheard a desperate voice screaming into the radio:

“For...