A judge in Brazil has told big mining companies BHP and Vale, along with their joint venture Samarco, to pay a lot of money for causing a dam to burst in 2015.
The dam in the south-east of the country broke and caused a big mudslide that killed 19 people.
The dam also made the Rio Doce river very dirty, making it hard for the water to flow to the ocean.
It was not clear at first how much money each company has to pay.
Judge Vinicius Cobucci said the companies are responsible for causing emotional pain to the people affected by the incident.
He said that the money, which will be changed to account for the increase in prices since 2015, will be put into a state fund and used for projects and plans in the area affected by the dam collapse.
The decision was made after state and federal public prosecutors filed a lawsuit.
Vale said to the media that they didn’t know about the decision yet.
The company said that as of December last year, the Renova Foundation has paid out 34. 7bn reais for compensation.
BHP and Samarco did not answer the media’s questions right away.
The decision lets the companies ask for a review of the ruling.
Samarco is a partnership between two companies, BHP from Australia and Vale from Brazil.
The disaster in Minas Gerais state was very bad and caused 700 people to leave their homes. It is one of the worst environmental disasters in the country.
When the dam broke, a lot of thick, red toxic mud flooded and destroyed the village of Bento Rodrigues.
It also made the Rio Doce river and Atlantic Ocean 650km away dirty, harming animals and making the drinking water bad for hundreds of thousands of people.
A report from 2016 said that the dam collapsed because it was badly designed.
The report, requested by Samarco’s owners BHP and Vale, did not say who caused the disaster.
Walls of dams that hold mining waste are usually made of a mix of sandy and clay-like material.
The report found that the way the Fundão dam was built in 2011 and 2012 didn’t let water drain properly, which caused the dam to break on 5 November 2015.
The sand in the dam walls got very wet and started acting like a liquid, which is called “liquefaction”.
A little earthquake on the same day as the dam burst might have made the dam break even faster, the report said.
The disaster caused people to closely examine the safety rules in the mining industry.
BHP and Vale are being sued by over 700,000 people in the UK.
In January 2019, a dam owned by Vale broke in the same state, close to the town of Brumadinho. This caused 270 people to die.
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Miners ordered to pay $9.7 billion for dam accident in Brazil
