Brazil’s federal authorities have stated that local miner and iron ore producer Vale has failed to take safety measures at its dams, following the Brumadinho dam burst, as reported by Reuters. Federal prosecutor Edison Vitorelli told Reuters that the twenty nine dams that Vale uses to store mining waste present elevated safety risks.
Vale has denied these allegations and stated that it has documentation to prove it has taken the measures to which it committed.
The company plans to increase its iron ore capacity from an annual 318 million mt to 450 million mt, as SteelOrbis previously reported. Vale expects 54 million mt of annual capacity to come from Minas Gerais. However, the future decisions of prosecutors may put some of that output increase at risk, since two mining disasters happened in the state.