At around 3.45pm on November 5 2015, a radio message crackled in the pick-up truck of a tree-planting team contracted by Brazilian iron ore producer Samarco.
The Fundão tailings dam, which stored the waste from Samarco’s Germano mine near Mariana, had burst. One of the workers, Paula Geralda Alves, immediately realised that her home village of Bento Rodrigues was in peril. “We heard a noise,” she recalls. “It sounded like ocean waves, a plane and helicopter all together.”
The mother of one jumped on her motorcycle and raced to warn fellow villagers. Alarmed residents clambered up a hill and watched as Bento Rodrigues was engulfed.
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