Vale sacrifices output to decommission dams after Brazil disaster

By Jake Spring and Gram Slattery

BRASILIA/BRUMADINHO, Brazil (Reuters) - Vale SA, the world’s largest iron ore miner, on Tuesday vowed to take as much as 10 percent of its ore output offline in order to decommission 10 more dams like the one that burst last week, killing scores of workers and nearby residents.

Chief Executive Fabio Schvartsman said it would temporarily paralyze operations using those dams and spend 5 billion reais ($1.3 billion) to decommission them over the next three years.

The move came as prosecutors began arresting Vale executives over the Friday collapse of a tailings dam in the Brazilian town of Brumadinho, which was buried in a torrent of mining waste that killed at least 84 people and left hundreds more missing.

More from World

Why do you see what I see? Now machine model can tell the colour the brain hints at 7.4 magnitude earthquake rocks Russia's east coast, prompts tsunami alerts

“We decided the company should, once and for all, do what it takes to remove any doubt about the safety of Vale’s dams,” Schvartsman told journalists in Brasilia.

The burst Brumadinho dam was one of 19 “upstream” tailings dams owned by Vale, all in the state of Minas Gerais, built with a method banned in Peru and Chile for safety reasons. Vale had already begun the process of decommissioning nine of them.

Schvartsman said Vale’s board had already approved the decision to decommission the 10 remaining dams of that kind and suspend the related mining operations as necessary, relocating 5,000 workers to other parts of the company.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Oli resigns: Who Nepal Gen Z protesters will accept as next PM, Deuba, Prachanda or Koirala?

Those operations currently produce 40 million tonnes of iron ore and 11 million tonnes of pellets per year, he said.

Vale forecast total iron output of 390 million in 2018.

($1 = 3.7201 reais)

(Reporting by Jake Spring in Brasilia and Gram Slattery in Brumadinho; Additional reporting by Marta Nogueira, Pedro Fonseca, Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro; Lisandra Paraguassu and Ricardo Brito in Brasilia; Marcelo Teixeira in Sao Paulo; Editing by Brad Haynes and Matthew Lewis)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.