It’s been three years, but Monica Santos still remembers the day in painful detail. The call at work from her cousin, who told her the dam had burst. The tsunami of strongly smelling mud on the hour’s drive towards her home town, Bento Rodrigues. The words of her fleeing neighbours, who stopped her on the way: “Bento is over: everyone’s gone”.
The 2015 disaster, a dam collapse at a Brazilian mine, killed 19 people and contaminated over a thousand hectares of land near the city of Mariana, in what the then-president described as “the biggest environmental disaster” to hit the country.
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