Brazilian pellet producer Samarco, a 50/50 JV between Vale and BHP Billiton, was fined BRL 1 million by Brazil’s environment authority, Ibama, for omitting in a company’s official document the existence of a temporary mud and waste deposit at an expositions park in the city of Barra Longa in the state of Minas Gerais.
Barra Longa was one of the cities affected by the Mariana disaster, which killed 19 people in November last year.
According to Ibama, Samarco said it didn’t have a mud and waste deposit area in the city, however, the Brazilian authority found out that the pellets producer had some 35,000 cubic-meters of waste deposited in the city’s expositions park, which were removed from the affected areas. With rains, the waste can go the rivers.
Samarco said it received the notification and added the waste deposited in expositions park was the solution the company found for helping cleanup the city.
As of now, all Samarco’s environment licenses for its Germano complex are provisionally suspended. A Minas Gerais judge said Samarco can’t operate with the same licenses it had before the disaster.