The Brazilian mining giant Vale has agreed to pay $7bn compensation for a deadly dam collapse that killed 272 people.
The Brumadinho disaster, on 25 January 2019, is considered one of the worst environmental tragedies in Brazilian history.
At just after noon that day the tailing dam’s sudden collapse caused a toxic torrent of mining waste to sweep across a rural pocket of Minas Gerais state at speeds of up to 80km/h, swallowing everything in its path. Many of the dead were Vale employees and 11 victims were never found.
On Thursday, just over two years later, Minas Gerais’s governor, Romeu Zema, announced Vale had agreed to pay the state R$37.68bn (£5bn/$7bn) in what he claimed was “Latin America’s biggest reparation package”.
“We did it!” Zema tweeted, adding that the multibillion-dollar settlement would not affect criminal or civil claims relating to the collapse’s human and environmental cost.
“We can’t change the past but we can improve the future,” Zema added, according to the newspaper Estado de São Paulo.
In a statement Vale’s chief executive, Eduardo Bartolomeo, said: “Vale is committed to fully repair and compensate the damage caused by the tragedy in Brumadinho and to increasingly contribute to the improvement and development of the communities in which we operate.
“We know that we have work to do and we remain firm in that purpose,” Bartolomeo added.
The deal was reportedly less than the R$54bn Minas Gerais had been demanding from Vale over the disaster in Brumadinho, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants just southwest of the state capital Belo Horizonte.
But Zema claimed the funds would help repair the local economy and environment, both battered by the mining disaster.
