Work accidents which become disasters: Mine tailing dam failures in Brazil

Abstract

The recent Vale S.A. dam failure in 2019 is one of the most serious work accidents ever in Brazil and is becoming a milestone for mining risk management systems in the country. It is characterized as an incident with irreversible and hard-to-manage intensive and direct impacts on workers and extensive impacts in space and time. Despite their low frequency, dam failures are not rare, but represent an open fracture in an universe in which abnormalities become the normal state of affairs in the everyday routine of corporations. Work accidents like this one and that involving the Samarco dam in 2015 undermine the trust in the entire mine tailings dam failure risk prevention and control system. We need to learn from these incidents to change the ideas and methods in vigor in an intersectoral and participatory manner.