“Brazil dam disaster firms to face criminal charges”, 20^th September 2019

…Brazilian federal police have proposed criminal charges against mining giant Vale and German safety firm Tüv Süd and 13 of their employees over January's deadly dam collapse, reports say. Police reportedly say both firms used falsified documents that said the Feijão dam was stable…

In July a Brazilian judge ordered Vale to pay compensation for all damages caused by the collapse of the dam, saying that that the company was responsible for fixing all the damages including the economic effects. The same month, emails emerged that showed Tüv Süd's own analysis of the dam initially failed to meet official requirements.

Tüv Süd inspected the dam in the months before the collapse. It was a "tailings" dam - an embankment filled with waste product - and decades of waste from the nearby mine had been piled up and grassed over. Tailings dams are vulnerable to "liquefaction", when, for various reasons, the solid material begins to act and move like a liquid, putting them at risk of becoming vulnerable to collapse. Documents and internal emails seized by investigators show that Tüv Süd employees knew for around a year that there was liquefaction at the dam…