It's important to note that the fish and fauna that was killed in the slide were native only to that area, meaning the dam disaster effectively extinguished quite a number of species, making the environmental impact even worse.
@@a2pabmb2 to be honest maybe he meant that the human cost was more important to mention atleast in my mind that’s the case. While he’s the local ecosystem will falter for a while I’m sure plenty of fish can live in that area and if we move some there they will eventually adapt to their new environment.
Yes, but that only counts if you put a dollar value on the lives lost. Corporations have a bad record for seeing the risk of deaths as worth it. Hey, it's important to keep the shareholders believing that these companies can produce finance growth, and therefore returns, quarter-upon-quarter.
@@GrandMoffJames Vale made the next best move, getting a lawsuit and saying "lol lmao xd get fucked and i will fucking do it again" and never paying a cent to the state or the victims
@@plaguedoctorjamespainshe6009 what? no way man. my mom works as a translator and has been following closely the developments, and they paid a ton of money. not enough, of course, but they have
Please, make a video on the Brumadinho desaster. It has some really shocking footages. As a brazilian, I think it's very important to let people know what those mining companies did. The costs were too high for too many people.
Dont forget to mention that the company had spreadsheets calculating the estimated cost of the dam failure. Yet they did not made the proper maintenance.
@@PlainlyDifficult Also, please put foreign names in a Google/Bing translator to listen how it's pronounced. It would be nice to add the names as text in the video too. I barely could understand most of the Brazilian names that you said.
As someone who has recently made a fairly huge leap in progress with OCD in the last year, it means a lot that one of my favourite youtubers is recognising OCD for what it is. OCD can be absolutely debilitating and really takes the joy out of life for some people. Thank you
I’m tired of people stigmatizing OCD as some every day thing that everyone has, same with people diagnosing themselves with ADD, and I have both. People also do it with ADHD too and it’s really annoying because it significantly diminishes the actual condition and people have the audacity to say stuff like “just focus” “ just stop doing that it’s ridiculous” and it’s infuriating to say the least. Stimulants literally work differently for people with real attention disorders. They just don’t understand but want to pretend they do.
I'm so proud of you! Great work!! My own OCD is the best it's ever been right now, and though it's never really been totally debilitating for me (my anxiety was what was debilitating, the OCD just jumped on the wagon to ride along), I don't ever want to feel like that again. It's just awful. I hope you'll do even better in the future! ❤
@@CorruptInfinityOfficial I'm so with you on all of that. I'm a mental health worker who also happens to have ADHD and is on the Autistic Spectrum. They go hand in hand as often as ADHD and OCD do, or all of the above! I'm always so glad to see people recognising the challenges of the neurodiverse, and donating to help drastically underfunded projects to try to make this neurotypical world a little bit easier to navigate.
Yup. Money and hope. The people responsible only wanted to cash in short-term rewards, meanwhile hoping that there'd be no big scandals before they leave the company. Each time I watch a scenario like this one I wonder if there's nothing useful that can be done with these waste products. Just storing and ignoring them seems to be a recipe for disaster.
@@zJoriz RIGHT!?! Maybe they could take the stuff and make concrete impregnated items, birdbaths, bricks, highway barriers, Etc., anything other than leaving a mountain of unstable crap.
You can't imagine how frustrating it is to listen all the time to radio ads from Vale and Samarco how they are working to compensate victims and restore the environment... what a bad joke. And as a resident of the region and at some point indirectly employed by Samarco and Vale I assure you that it will happen again...
Companies not caring about the population... that can apply to every single country on earth. Everyone just wants to make easy money for doing a bad job.
And up to this day, the chemical mud is still littered everywhere, people are dislocated and have their rend suffer (since most are fishermen) and Samarco is still to be met with justice. Nothing new in Brazil
just reading the title is giving me flashbacks. this was absolutely horrifying to see, even more horrifying in real time, seeing the news getting worse and worse every single day, the number of dead going up, just the sheer size of the wreckage, it was awful
I remember the first time I heard something about it. "And the dam collapsed, overflowing through the city..." And I though: Yep, all dead. No way someone would survive this. It was truly awful.
I live in the capital of Minas Gerais and I'm still enraged by both disasters (this one and Brumadinho). So far none of these mining companies were held accountable and reparations are a joke. During the rescue efforts in Brumadinho, there's this scene of a female helicopter pilot cautiously hovering over the mud (which is an extremely difficult manoeuvre) to save a victim. I cried watching it live. It was devastating and heartbreaking. If you're making a video about it you should really include this footage.
My gram and her sisters all had stages of ocd not sure about the brothers her youngest sister literally would know if you had slightly moved an object she had a fit she was the worse my gram literally spent a whole day cleaning her house half of the day on one side and the other on the other side and then she wondered why I ran to the dog lot I wasn't interested in cleaning
I have ocd and it sucks. I have to plan on leaving for places 10 minutes earlier than I usually would because after getting in the car, I inevitably have to go back inside to check the stove and the locks at least twice.
You sometimes wonder how many of these companies had a fear culture where issues like this weren't really given much gravitas due to the worry of losing your job. If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. This goes for so many of these disasters.
Until today, Samarco-Correa and Vale do Rio Doce never payed the victim's families the money issued. Vale, responsible for Brumadinho Disaster mentioned in the end of the video, is still working on contructions all over Brazil and has never been punished for its crimes. It is very sad to live in Brazil, to be honest.
Part of the reason I love your channel in content is that the person behind it all really appreciates what it is to be human. You've always respected mental health and talked about it in a non-stigmatized way. I really appreciate you using your platform for fundraisers/causes like supporting people with OCD. It's a very stigmatized illness. And of course as always, love the video!
I think you made a small mistake when you said "20 billion Dollars, which is 5 billion US Dollars". The currency in Brazil is the Real, with symbol "R$" -- which obviously contains the symbol more commonly associated with various dollars around the world -- so it was probably 20 billion Real.
It always amazes me ... tailing dam failures are known and at that time it was quite easy to point the results to the company. I cant imagine that it would cost this company nearly as much to fix this damn or build a second one behind or what ever emergency measure would be needed to fix this would cost nearly as much as the damn failing. Which was not a possibility but a certainty at that point when they did the redesign. Is it really that hard to get them to spend that money beforehand?
Because mining companies are designed to go bankrupt when outside costs are leveraged on them. They quite literally try to earn as much money as cheaply as possible for their owners, before going insolvent either from (disaster) fines or eventual decommissioning clean up costs.
Yet again human factor is the main reason for this disaster. The production should have been slowed down, when storage was half full, but no company will do that, when it comes to spending some money for safety.
Nope. Safety has to be imposed uniformly, on all companies, by the government. Otherwise doing things safely in one company represents a barrier to profit. Sometimes strong unions can impose safety for workers, though. Edit: corporations have a legal obligation to increase profit for the shareholders. Not to refrain from killing people.
@@grmpEqweer Actually, it really depends on the jurisdiction. After the Westray mine disaster in Canada, Canadian government officials were so incensed at the blatant disregard management had for the safety of their workers that they were horrified to discover that occupational health and safety regulations had no criminal penalties. That was changed. Now, in Canada, it is possible for employers to be criminally liable for the safety of their workers. Workplace safety violations, in Canada, can now lead to criminal prosecutions for various crimes, up to negligent homicide. One of the unintended consequences of this was that the global pandemic nearly forced the closure of the meat packing industry. It all hinged on whether management at a meat packing plant where a worker died from the virus had taken reasonable precautions to prevent it. Erring on the side of caution, my employer (not part of the meat packing industry) required employees showing symptoms, to self-isolate for two weeks. Failure to stay home when exhibiting symptoms could lead to disciplinary measures up to and including termination.
@@richardbell7678 Cool. Employers...No, companies, ought to be criminally liable if they get someone killed. Employee or not. ...This is mostly not the case in the US. Edit: ...But it's a uniformly applied threat in Canadian business.
@@grmpEqweer The thing is, while there are many aspects of "person" that can be applied to a company, they cannot serve jail time. Managers within a company can serve jail time. The criminal penalties from workplace safety violations are applied to managers that were found to be criminally negligent.
It made my day that one of my most favorite RU-vid channels is doing a fundraiser for OCD. I have struggled with OCD since childhood. It's such a misunderstood disorder and I try my best to spread awareness. Thank you so so much for your fundraiser. It helps make people like me feel more understood and cared for. Your channel is great and I really enjoy your content! Thanks!
I live here in Brazil, and I've seen all the videos, live footage and recovery efforts... It was crazy, and very very fucking scary for all the people living close to it, if you can, search for some people going through the areas effected months after what happened, it was still all f###ed up... Truly terrible.
I’m really happy to see one of my favourite youtubers supporting such a worthy cause. I work as a support worker/driver for a supported living home and one of our service users has severe OCD. It really affects their daily life to an extreme degree and causes boughts of self injurious behaviour when an OCD behaviour is disrupted or prevented. It is extremely difficult to watch a bright young person struggle with this and I’m glad that plainly is supporting the cause.
I remember when it happened, it hit people all over the country really hard, many got moved by it and tried to help, while some victims blamed the victims, no joke, my mother is one of those nasty ones. Some people wrote messages to the families, others to the fallen, even in honor of the lost animals and how many were grieving them.
Yeah, weird. The victims of dams are almost never the engineers, etc. who built the dam. Victim blaming is already a not nice thing to do. Blaming the victims of a dam rupture? No.
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Mosul dam in Iraq has been on the edge of disaster for decades but has not failed yet. It might be interesting to look at because it is an improperly built dam that is being maintained and repaired (except for when isis captured it). It has been called the most dangerous dam on earth.
Sadly these companies make the following calculation, of which cost more: to create a proper safe dam that has very small chances to break, or create a simple unsafe dam and the problems related if it ever break. If it costs less to the company to pay bribes after the disaster happen than to build a safer dam, they will choose the first.
Hey John, interesting video like usual. Have you thought of covering the Mexico City or Bellingham petroleum explosions, the Mexico City one is a doozy.
Mexico city’s is a wild one, i remember reading all sorts of conspiracies about it. I think it’s still a bit too recent to know all the details but it’s surely interesting.
I know this isn't related to the video all that much, but I really appreciate seeing a fundraiser about OCD. I have OCD and it's really sucky, and the fact that someone with a following is reaching out to help people like us totally warms my heart. I love your videos so much, they're informative and keep my full attention on things I otherwise wouldn't hear about! Keep doing what you do, good sir! :D
Not everyone has that choice. A lot of the people who lived in the area were poor and had to live where they could afford. People aren't stupid, they just can't afford something safer. Safety is a privilege, don't forget that.
Thank you for addressing this subject in which negligence and blind profit counts more than human lives, also thank you for your effort in pronouncing all those difficult names in Portuguese. As a Brazilian I appreciated it.
As a citizen of one of the affected regions, a place called Steel Valley where a lot of the mined iron ore ends up, I'm really glad to see foreign creators shedding light on the topic, specially since you followed this one up immediatelly with the Brumadinho one. Bravo sir.
This is literally the best youtube channel by far. I can't even begin to list the reasons why I find these videos entertaining but god damn I can't get enough. Hope you'll keep at it and your passion for doing these videos doesn't die for a very long time. Thank you for the videos!
HUGE fan from Brazil, tnx a lot for the video man! :) My uncle worked on both Samarco and Logos, and I can 100% surelly tell: they damn corpos knew it all before hand.
These videos are super addictive You should look into the USS Thresher 593 sometime. It was a nuclear sub that experienced failure during a test dive, killing all 129 people aboard and changing submarine safety standards. It was the first nuclear sub lost to sea.
Jon, thank you for the OCD awareness. I have type pure O obsessive and it's hell sometimes. Thank you for awareness and the respect you showed with that
My Mrs. would have cringed and been spouting off if she heard how you pronounced her home town. I loved it. I like to stir the pot. Always love the channel as well
Great video as usual! Love the title, reminded me of the old Robert Conrad 'Wild, Wild, West' tv show titles. Keep up the fantastic and very hard research/work, your fans love you!
Liquefaction - When the solid ground you're on, suddenly isn't. Fun for the whole town! Anybody who has made sand castles at the beach knows what will happen when you try to stack a hill of wet silt behind an earthen wall. Yet, here we are....again.
Yeah, Christchurch knows all about that. Get an earthquake, even a relatively weak one, with precisely the wrong wave frequency and the soil resonance triggers severe liquefaction.
when he said "Just a few hours drive down the road", talking about the next big tailings incident,my brain heard the a few hours part and thought the next incident was only a few hours later lols
I work in the insurance industry, and was involved in a claim a couple of years ago when a dozer transiting the wall trigger the failure of a red mud (bauxite) tailings dam. Operator was fortunate to escape with his life, and the failure was contained with a second bund. Australia has much more strict design standards for tailings dams, but even then accidents still occur.
This was an awful tragedy and I’m not at all trying to make light of the situation but I misread the title as ‘The Marinara Disaster’ and it gave me a bit of a chuckle
I think the "legacy scale" actually refers more to legal and engineering legacy than cultural. Like a building fire resulting in complete overhaul of fire codes, and then that overhauled code was copied by other natures. Most of these disasters definitely loom much larger for people who watched it happen in real time.
Another great video - I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on the Aberfan disaster if you haven't covered it previously! I learn so much from these :)
Thank you for bringing awareness to OCD. it is far more severe a thing than people think and horrible to live with, I only know from the outside, my husband almost died from his OCD.
I love your videos and while I applaud your donation effort for OCD I can't help but wonder if a more important and impactful donation drive might be one that helps those of this very disaster who are still struggling and the death toll still rises. Your video helps bring light of this event to the masses giving it great philanthropic potential to help.
I live in Governador Valadares, a city where a river goes through called the Rio Doce. The Mariana tragedy affected this river, and let me tell you, it wasn't something minor. The river already wasn't in great shape to begin with due to sewer being dropped in the river, but this event completely destroyed it. When the disaster happened, the river didn't even look like water anymore, it was pure toxic mud. Years have passed, and the river has "healed" a little bit. It looks better, less muddy and it isn't bright red anymore. However, it still looks bad, and I'm afraid that it won't ever recover to the beautiful fresh river that it once was.
Something similar happened just after a few years in brumadinho (which is probably the one you mentioned) and we were very worried it would destroy a very important museum thats near the place but it ended up not happening.
@@Igor_054 exactly, not only should the operations be shut down, but companies dissolved and leadership persecuted, paying a couple billions out of their trillions does nothing to these people, they are just gonna make another company and keep doing the same shit
I've been to Paracatu de Baixo, one of the two villages most affected by the disaster, the entire population had to leave on short notice, the school (only place where entrance was permited because it was public and the church had a high risk of collapsing) still had all the student's materials on the tables and the board was still written, the mud had reached about knee height on the second floor and everything on the first floor was coated in a horrible red dust. And even after being relocated to the city, the former residents of Bento rodriges and Paracatu de baixo were discriminated and had a very hard time searching for jobs and didn't receive enough compensations from Samarco. It's horrifying the sort of effect those situations can have over people's lives.
The "funny" part is that everybody forgot about the event already, nobody talks about It at all, except in the affected areas. At the end of the day, everybody is just a damn number in the statistics.
I was there, I live very close to where the disaster was, for days we saw the mud slowly advancing, polluting the river, killing everything until it reached the ocean.
A similar disaster happened in Val di Stava, Italy on 19 July, 1985. Not one, but Two tailings dams failed sending water and waste into the village of Stava bellow, killing 268 people, it was one of Italy's worst industrial disasters.
Great video, concise and informative. As a side note, I kept noticing what looked like UK-themed flotsam in the images from the disaster (which turned out to be revealing of my parochial cultural knowledge). The first is the Ouro Preto marker at 0:24, which is emblazoned with E R plus a crown and a cross pattée. As an Anglophile American my first thought was Elizabeth Regina, but her standardized symbol was different, and a little googling taught me about the Estrada Real road system (fascinating stuff). The second is the half-buried clock face at 7:23, which I thought at first was Big Ben (as if that were the only clock tower in the world). I haven't found the right match, but I'm thinking the shape is wrong for Big Ben. Anyway it was fun thinking I kept seeing British effluvia in this doc on a tailings dam disaster in Brazil...
You should cover the 1983/84 Glen Canyon dam incident. Flooding overwhelmed the outlet works and bypass tubes, and the untested slipways began to erode away under the massive water flow. The slipways passed through the canyon walls where the dam was anchored, and there was serious concern that the dam may fail entirely. Some quick thinking by engineers and inventive use of plywood to add some height to the slipway gates was able to save the dam, turning a disaster into a near-miss. On the disaster scale, it would be low, but high on the historical legacy scale. If Glen Canyon Dam had failed, it's likely that the Hoover dam downstream would have also been destroyed by the massive flood of Lake Powell's entire capacity coming down the Colorado at once. It would have wrecked The US's entire water management system for the Southwest, and likely lead to serious water shortage and depopulation in Utah, Arizona, and California, a disaster on par with Chernobyl in its disruption of life and the US's economy.
Wow I have never seen a fundraiser done for OCD before! I feel like a lot of people think of it as a personality trait rather than a condition that can really impact someone's life. As a person with OCD, thank you!
I like your videos! I have a question, though. What are the black and white bars that appear in the corner of your videos, and what is their significance and/or meaning? Thanks!
Dont forget Aberfan in Wales. A mining slag heap placed upon water slid down the hillside and smothered the school. The whole school of children wiped out along with teachers. On reading the comments I'm amazed at the amount of disasters from mining. Mistakes made to be learnt from seems to be quite an offensive excuse considering how many lifes are affected around the planet when it goes wrong. This has to be a talking point on the board of stakeholders in their exploitations.
Well, i was born and live here(Mariana) my entire life and is very interesting when someone talks about this. The city felt the shock over this "accident" but we managed to bring everything together. The district of Bento Rodrigues is under construction yet and i know some of the families that lost some members and they're with basically another life now. PS. I put "accident" under parenthesis cuz we have a lot, and i mean A LOT of contradictions. I have a sister that was safety security (idk exactly the name of the job) but she got a whole long story of conspiracy with, by her words, the probably cause of the accident.
You should do a video on the johnstown flood! It was the biggest natural disaster in the us until hurricane katrina and was caused by a dam failure from a reservoir owned by a bunch of 1%er's that didnt maintain the dam and actually modified it so they could drive across it! Something like 2200 people died from it. It was also the first major operation for the red cross.
