Broken Brumadinho a year after dam collapse - ‘Vale ended our lives’

Natalia and Josiana
The friendship between Josiana Resende and Natalia de Oliveira is one born out of loss - they got to know each other after the dam collapsed at the Corrego do Feijao mine exactly a year ago, killing both their sisters.
Natalia's sister Lecilda and Josiana's sister Juju were great friends. Lecilda introduced Juju to her husband and she was a bridesmaid at the wedding. Now the bond has extended to the surviving sisters.
Natalia and Josiana's friendship is also born out of a shared cause - finding their sisters' bodies. Of the 270 people who died, they and nine others are still missing.

No closure

"We re-live what happened on the 25th every day," says Josiana. "The fact that we can't say goodbye doesn't give us any closure - we can't move on. Time has stood still for us."
This past year has been hard on Juju's dad Geraldo too. He's wearing a T-shirt with a picture of his daughter and her twin boys Geraldo Augusto and Antonio Augusto.
The photo was taken at one of their monthly milestones - Geraldo can't remember if they were eight or nine months at the time but she loved celebrating each and every month. She died shortly afterward. The boys are the reason the family keeps going.
"When a father cries, it's such deep pain," Geraldo says between tears. "Those people at Vale ended our lives, we lost the will to live. I have thoughts that I shouldn't talk about. I just want my daughter to come back - but I know it's not going to happen."

Devastated landscape

When the mud and mining waste barrelled through a valley near the town of Brumadinho on 25 January 2019, it wiped out everything in its wake. Now, there's a void in the hillside where the dam used to be. And below it, for nearly 10km (six miles), a lunar landscape of dark mud, with water collecting in the crevasses.

29 January 2019

Satellite image of Brumadinho mine in Brazil 29 January 2019

24 January 2019

Satellite image of Brumadinho mine in Brazil 24 January 2019


It's rainy season in Brumadinho. The showers last for days at this time of year. But despite the rain, the firefighters keep working in the dam zone.
"It's a massive area, we're talking 10km from where the dam broke to the final part where it met the Rio Paraopeba. And it's a perimeter of 32km," says firefighter Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Constantino. "Now it's the rainy season, access is difficult for our people and for our machines but our job is to find those missing 11 victims."

The clean-up

The dam collapse in Brumadinho was one of Brazil's worst environmental disasters. Forests were destroyed and rivers polluted, so it's a big job to relocate the mud to a safer place and return this area to its previous state.
"We've got 2,500 people working here and we're hoping to get rid of all the waste from the dam within five years," says Rogerio Galvao who is in charge of the clean-up operation for Vale, who owned the dam. "But that depends on the progress of firefighters, with their search and recovery efforts."

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