As the pale yellow glow of Brazil’s spring sun set over the Doce River on a Friday evening in October 2015, life for Jonathan Knowles was as good as it had ever been. The modest living he made from a water-valve business saw him end each working week in the same way, with his wife Sheila and their four-year-old son, Enzo. They would set out chairs in the garden of their two-bedroom home, a new-build on the outskirts of Governador Valedares, in the Minas Gerais region of the Brazilian countryside, where they would pick marinaded beef off the barbecue and screen 80s music videos from a projector on to a wall. “We adored our life,” recalls Knowles, a Yorkshireman who moved to Brazil for love.
A week later, at 3.45pm on 5 November, the Fundão tailings dam burst in the city of Mariana, 150 miles away, unleashing about 40m cubic metres of toxic mining waste into the Doce (“sweet”) River visible from their home, killing 19 people, rendering hundreds homeless and triggering the country’s biggest environmental disaster. Villages, livelihoods, farms, fish and wildlife were obliterated. It destroyed, damaged or contaminated everything in its path, law courts have since heard.
