But already there are allegations that there had been warnings about the design of the dam and its safety.Īsked whether she still had confidence in Brazilian mining regulations, Ramos said she believed safety measures needed to be revised in the wake of this disaster. By Thursday the firm, and its partner Vale, had sent senior management to see the damage caused and promised an emergency fund expected to be around $100m. BHP Billiton’s UK shares, which closed at 883p last night, were changing hands at almost £20 only 16 months ago.īHP Billiton was formed in 2001, when Australia’s Broken Hill Proprietary merged with South Africa’s Billiton. Commodity prices are at a multi-year lows as a result of slowing demand from China. Some £8bn has been wiped off the value of the company as its shares in the UK and Australia have slumped by an average of 14%.įor the company – which operates around the world extracting and marketing a range of products from oil, gas, coal and iron ore to copper, silver and uranium – the dam burst comes as mining firms are under pressure. Shares in BHP Billiton, a FTSE-100 company and therefore a key holding of pension funds around the world – have been battered. The mine and dams are operated by Samarco Mineração SA, a joint venture between the Anglo-Australian mining group BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest mining company, and the Brazilian iron ore giant Vale. “We have thousands of hectares of protected areas destroyed and the total extinction of all the biodiversity along this stretch of the river.” “It is a tragedy of enormous proportions,” Marilene Ramos, president of Ibama, the federal environmental agency, said. Already the lack of oxygen and high temperatures caused by the pollutants has killed off much of the aquatic life along a 500km stretch of the river. Brazil’s national water agency, ANA, has warned that the presence of arsenic, zinc, copper and mercury now present in the Rio Doce make the water untreatable for human consumption.
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