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Report presented on Friday 26 by the Federal Police indicates that the rupture of the Vale dam in Brumadinho, on January 25, 2019, occurred through a drilling made from top to bottom of the dam, where the tailings are stored. The operation began five days before the tragedy and was underway on the date of the breach.
Drilling was being carried out to diagnose the state of the tailings deposited in the structure and subsequent installation of equipment to measure the internal pressure of the dam.
The report refutes Vale’s arguments that a combination of deformation of the dam, caused by its own weight, and heavy rains would have contributed to the collapse. The document showed, in relation to rainfall, that in 2019 the rainfall regime was lower than previous years.
The drilling, together with the low level of the safety factor of the structure, as has already been verified in the investigations, caused the rupture by liquefaction, which is the increase in the volume of water in the solid waste, exerting pressure on the dam and leading to their breakup.
According to the Federal Police expert, Leonardo Mesquita, the liquefaction occurred when the drilling reached, at a depth of 68 meters, a layer of the structure with a greater volume of fine tailings, which are more likely to go into liquefaction. “The drilling was taking place at the most critical point of the dam,” said the expert. A fluid used to lubricate the tip of the drill increased the pressure at this most fragile point in the dam.
Before starting the drilling that ended up causing liquefaction, Vale hired a third company, whose name was not disclosed by the PF, to take an initial step in this tailings analysis process. However, the PF reported that the data from this first stage, which lasted from October to December 2018, was not processed by Vale, which nevertheless went to the second stage of the process in January.
“There was a coup,” concluded the delegate responsible for the investigations, Luiz Augusto Pessoa Nogueira. Vale should have first checked what was diagnosed by the contracted company ”.
The report released today is the most important for the possible criminal liability of Vale employees and directors for the collapse of the structure. The dam collapse killed 272 people. Eleven are still missing. The delegate responsible for the investigations, however, says that the investigation continues and that there is still no definition of possible accusations. “I do not rule out any type of hypothesis,” he declared.
Other hypotheses raised since the dam failure were discarded by the PF, in addition to the one presented by Vale. Among them, detonations in a mine near the dam that could have affected the physical structure of the dam.
The report asked Vale why the miner did not process the information from the company hired to study the tailings of the dam before starting the drilling that ended up helping to trigger the liquefaction. He got the following response, on a note. “Vale informs that it learned on Friday 26th of the dispatch of the report of the Federal Police technical expert opinion on the possible causes of the rupture of Dam I, of the Córrego do Feijão mine, in Brumadinho (MG). The company will evaluate the entire content of the report and, in due course, will comment on the file through its lawyer David Rechulski ”.
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