Brazil to Sue Mining Companies for $5 Billion Over Dam Burst

By teleSUR

30 November 15

The lawsuit will be filed Monday demanding mining giants BHP Billiton and Vale set up a fund for 20 billion reais to be used for cleanup costs and damages.

razil announced Friday that it will be suing mining giants BHP Billiton and Vale for over US$5 billion in cleanup costs and damages after the collapse of a waste water dam at an iron-ore mine earlier this month.

The disaster, the biggest of its kind in Brazil’s history, killed more than 14 people, displaced more than 500 people and contaminated a river used as a water source by 250,000 people in the area.

"There was a huge impact from an environmental point of view," Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said at a press conference in the capital Brasilia. "It is not a natural disaster, it is a disaster prompted by economic activity, but of a magnitude equivalent to those disasters created by forces of nature."

According to the minister, the lawsuit would demand that BHP Billiton, Vale and the mine operator Samarco, which they co-own, create a fund of 20 billion reais (US$5.2 billion). The money would go to environmental recovery and compensation for victims.

The suit will be filed on Monday, Attorney General Luis Inacio Adams said. On Thursday, a court in Brazil confirmed the freezing of around US$78 million from the accounts of Samarco.

Also, the decision to file the lawsuit comes few days after the United Nations human rights agency said the waste spill from the dam collapse was in fact toxic, debunking claims by the mining companies that the mud waste was “chemically stable” and would not contaminate or change the composition of the Rio Doce river nearby.

"The scale of the environmental damage is the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools of toxic mud waste contaminating the soil, rivers and water system of an area covering over 850 kilometers," the U.N. agency's special rapporteur John Knox said in the statement.

Despite their denial of the toxic impact, mining giants BHP-Billiton and the Brazilian firm Vale had agreed to pay US$260 million through their Brazilian subsidiary Samarco to the Brazilian government for damages caused by the environmental catastrophe. Prosecutors and analysts say that the amount pledged by the companies was too little to cover the cost of the cleanup.

Echoing the U.N.’s view, biologists have also expressed shock and worry over the impact of the dam burst.
“As there was never an environmental incident of this magnitude, it is impossible to calculate the real impact right now,” Klemens Laschefski, a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, told Chemistry World on Nov. 21.

Laschefski added that amount of mud would affect the flow of the river and “will bring profound ecosystem changes, which will also influence the species, including with the possibility of disappearance of endemic species.”