“Attention, attention! This is an emergency! Attention, attention! This is a real emergency situation involving a dam collapse. Leave your homes immediately. Use the escape route to get to the meeting point, then remain there and await further instructions.” At 4 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2019, residents of four villages Barão de Cocais municipality, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, were awakened by this message blaring over loudspeakers, with sirens also going off. This was just two weeks after the collapse of a dam holding back mining waste, or tailings, in the nearby municipality of Brumadinho, that killed 272 people. That prompted Daniel Neri, a physics professor at the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais, to conduct a study, which later culminated in a thesis on what’s now known as “dam terrorism.” “It’s a strategy of dispossession,” Neri says. He points out that shortly after the collapse of the tailings dam at the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in Brumadinho, companies that provided services to the iron ore industry in Minas Gerais suddenly declared that the safety certifications for some dams, known as the DCE, were no longer valid. This was despite the fact that most of these dams weren’t even due for their routine assessments by Brazil’s national mining regulator, the ANM. “In other words, DCEs guaranteed that the dams were safe,” Neri says. “Then, the certifiers revoked the DCEs, and the dams began to be considered unsafe. As a result, mining companies could use this supposed lack…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Dam terrorism: How mining companies in Brazil scare residents into relocating first appeared on EnviroLink Network.