History, Karl Marx once wrote, repeats itself “first as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Perusing the global mining industry’s expressions of horror at last month’s Brumadinho tailings dam collapse, it is hard not to recall the line. Describing a disaster likely to have killed more than 300 people as “tragic” might carry more weight had the incident not arrived just 38 months after another of Vale’s Brazilian iron ore operations failed, again at huge human and environmental cost.
>Alerted to reported comments from senior bankers that poor safety records could make the sector “uninvestable”, London’s listed groups have already proposed higher standards
Still, the scale of the destruction at the Córrego do Feijão mine has served as a brutal reminder of the perils of investing in natural resources companies at a time when trust in the industry remains in short supply. Worse still, efforts to quantify tailings dam failures around the world appear to suggest that the deadliness, magnitude and even frequency of such disasters are getting worse (see table below).
Mining disasters