On January 25th this year, a Brazilian federal judge ruled that miners Vale and BHP and their joint venture Samarco must pay 47.6 billion reais (US$9.67 billion) in damages for a 2015 tailings dam burst.
The dam that disintegrated in the southeastern Brazilian city of Mariana caused a giant mudslide that killed 19 people and severely polluted the Rio Doce river all the way to its outlet to the Atlantic Ocean.
According to the legal decision seen by Reuters, judge Vinicius Cobucci wrote that the amount was fixed taking as a factor the value of expenses already acknowledged by the companies in repair and compensation actions. The judge wrote in the legal document that the money would be put in a state fund and used for projects and initiatives in the area affected by the dam collapse.
Later on January 25th, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva railed against Vale for “not having done anything to repair the destruction” caused by the collapse of a second tailings dam in Brumadinho in 2019.
“Five years and Vale has done nothing to repair the destruction caused,” President Lula said in a post on social media platform X, according to Reuters.
“Support for victims’ families, environmental recovery and, above all, inspection and prevention in mining projects are needed so we do not have new tragedies”, he added.
Vale was justifiably and well sued in the Brazilian judicial system for the damage caused. Where environmental damage of this magnitude occurs – failed tailings dams meant to retain noxious and dangerous compounds – maximum penalties must be applied in the interest of protection of the environment and riverain dwellers.
In Guyana, a different reality prevails where there is little accountability or recompense for environmental and mining disasters. On 19 August 1995, the tailings dam at Omai Gold Mines Limited broke and leaked its contents into the Essequibo River. An estimated 4.2 million cubic metres of cyanide-laced slurry escaped. Eighty kilometres of the Essequibo River were declared an environmental disaster zone. Large numbers of fish were killed and livelihoods of hundreds along the river were disrupted. Thankfully there were no deaths linked to the spill and after coursing through the Omai Creek the waste was dispersed and dissipated in the Essequibo River. The principal mine owners, Canada’s Cambior Inc – a 65% shareholder got off lightly. It and the dam builder should have been sued by the regulatory authorities here – the state was a 5% shareholder – but nothing was done. It was back to mining in short order with the acquiescence of the government which in a depressed economy wanted to ensure jobs were preserved and the paltry royalties collected.
Approaching the 30th anniversary of the disaster, Cambior et al should have been financing continuous studies of the Omai and Essequibo waterways to determine the residual impacts of this disaster on flora and fauna. The funding should have established baseline studies on the health status of those living along the river and enabled testing for the presence of heavy metal residues. Nothing like that is being done. It was as if in the interest of ripping out gold, none of the trauma of that period must have contemporary resonance. It must. This is particularly so as new Omais and Cambiors are on the horizon and scouting for opportunities in the same areas no doubt fully aware of the regulatory malaise that prevails here.
How else can one explain the great escape by medium to large-scale Australian miner, Troy Resources Inc without restoring its mine site at Karouni. This could only have been achieved with the complicity of influential persons – again – a PPP/C administration. This government must take its environmental stewardship obligations seriously. It doesn’t. Any new medium to large-scale mining agreement must come with hefty bonds, insurance and other protective mechanisms to ensure we are safe from disasters like Omai, Troy and Vale.
Nowhere is the regulatory laxity more dangerous than in relation to the offshore oil extraction operations by ExxonMobil. Producing at a heady clip of over 600,000 barrels a day and pushing each of the three platforms beyond what had been their inscribed capacity, ExxonMobil has made clear its intentions are to get all the oil out of the ground as soon as possible. That is its equation which unfortunately also seems to be the government’s despite the fact that the state is the ultimate custodian.
More than four years after oil extraction began, the government is still to convince the public that were a spill or bigger disaster to occur it has some ability to respond immediately. There have been various mock exercises, desk top operations and near-shore manoeuvres but nothing that assures the public that this government can respond or even mobilise a private sector-led containment operation. With its trillion-dollar budget, much more effort has to be put into equipping the Environmental Protection Agency and the coastguard to respond to a major event where the ExxonMobil FPSOs are located.
Last week, there was a warning offshore the idyllic Tobago where a tanker capsized and leaked the oil it was carrying. While containment booms and other measures have been deployed, the oil continues to leak and has fouled beaches crucial to the Tobago economy. What was disconcerting was the declaration that Tobago was not ready for this event despite the Twin-Island Republic’s oil operations over the last century. Tobago House of Assembly Chief Secretary Farley Augustine was reported by the Trinidad Express as saying “Tobago was never ever ready for this kind of a spill; you’re talking about an island that does not have sufficient amount of booms, an island that doesn’t have storage, adequate storage capacity for this kind of oil or for toxic material. We never prepared for this as an eventuality”.
Tobago Emergency Management Agency director Allan Stewart described the situation as a logistical nightmare.
“You have to talk about building capacity on the island as we see this thing is even moving towards what can be considered a Tier Three. Tier Three means that there is international involvement. Those persons have already started speaking to us; the United Nations reached out to me sometime just after lunch and they are asking how can (they) help,” he said.
This is not the situation that Guyana must be found in and the government must begin budgeting for the full range of responses to a spill or similar accident. Importantly it must abandon its challenge to the court’s decision that ExxonMobil has to furnish a guarantee to cover any type of damage from its operations.
