Tailings Dam Spills at Mount Polley and Mariana
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- Published on Tuesday, 13 November 2018 18:48
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1705 ... November 14, 2018
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Tailings Dam Spills at Mount Polley and Mariana:
Chronicles of Disasters Foretold
Judith Marshall
On August 4, 2014, the dam holding toxic waste from the Mount Polley copper and gold mine in the Cariboo region of British Columbia (BC) collapsed. More than 24 million cubic metres of metals-laden fine sand and water were spilled from the breached dam, creating the largest environmental disaster in Canada’s mining history. The spill flooded Polley Lake and flowed into Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. Land, water systems and salmon habitat were destroyed. The Northern Secwepemc people, on whose territory the mine was located, lost land, livelihoods and traditional uses integrally linked to the land.
On November 5, 2015, the Fundão tailings dam, an even larger reservoir of mine... waste, collapsed at the Samarco iron mine in Mariana, Brazil. More than 32 million cubic metres of toxic tailings were spilled into the 853-kilometre-long Rio Doce (Sweet River in English) causing a tsunami-like wave of toxic muck that rapidly made its way through the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo and out to the Atlantic coast. The Rio Doce basin is home to 3.2 million people.
The Samarco mine disaster is the largest in Latin American history. Nineteen people lost their lives, three nearby communities were buried and more than 1,200 people were left homeless. Communities located even hundreds of kilometres from the mine site lost their lands, crops, livestock, fishing livelihoods and water access. These included an Indigenous community of 400 Krenak people living on the remaining 4,000 hectares of their traditional land on the bank of the Rio Doce.
Canada and Brazil may appear to represent such markedly different jurisdictions that a meaningful comparison seems unlikely: Canada is understood as a rich, "developed," politically stable nation in the Global North, while Brazil is located in the poorer, "developing" Global South, popularly understood to be endemically corrupt and politically unstable. Yet a closer look at the mining disasters at Mount Polley and Mariana immediately reveals remarkable similarities, not only in the contexts and circumstances leading up to the breaches but also in the corporate, governmental and civil society responses afterwards.