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.
Torrents of polluted water ran for 650km (400 miles) into the Atlantic Ocean, taking an estimated £2.5bn toll on the region’s biodiversity and leaving behind a cleanup that is expected to take more than a decade.
“Life was phenomenal – until it became about survival,” says Knowles, 57, who is among more than 200,000 people bringing a $6.9bn (£5bn) lawsuit – among the biggest group actions in English legal history – against the Anglo-Australian mining multinational BHP, which owned Samarco jointly with the Brazilian iron-ore mining giant Vale.
The case is due to be reheard in the court of appeal next month, in the latest stage in a three-and-a-half year legal fight on British soil that seeks “full and fair redress” on behalf of more than 190,000 individuals, 530 businesses, 150 members of Krenak indigenous communities, 25 municipalities and 15 faith-based institutions, including the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Mariana. For the victims, it is an “opportunity for real justice”, the region’s attorney general, Frederico de Assis Faria, said last year.
For Knowles, the sight of the river immediately after the disaster left an indelible mark: “The water was brown like thick, chocolate soup; a mud avalanche. It came like tidal waves. As the days progressed, the whole surface as far as you could see became a blanket of dead fish. Cows and horses floated lifeless on their backs, only their legs visible above the water.
“That water used to be everything. It’s where people gathered to fish, for hang-gliding and water sports, to walk and run at weekends. Ten different varieties of mango grew from its fertile banks; monkeys lived on an island in its centre.”
After the collapse, it became a place to fear, he says. “Even now, six years on, you can put a magnet in a plastic bag and if you touch the mud around the river, it sticks.”
A life upturned
Knowles and Brazilian-born Sheila met in Harrogate, England, in 2009 when she was a passenger on the bus he drove. They moved to Brazil the following year, while she was pregnant with Enzo: “We settled in the middle of nowhere. The land is as flat as a pancake apart from one huge mountain which sits, like a pimple, on the outskirts.
“The mile-wide river snakes its way through the landscape and the area has its own unique climate. A constant, still warmth beats from the ground.”
Knowles, who worked in construction, arrived in Brazil during a building boom. In March 2015, he began importing valves he had developed to help local people regulate fluctuating water bills. By September – two months before the dam collapse – he had sold a quarter of his stock and broken even.
News of the disaster came early in the morning of 6 November. “In the village, life-changing events were announced by a car providing information by Tannoy. It was first thing in the morning and we were indoors. I stepped into the front yard and recognised the description, in Portuguese, of an avalanche of water. Then came a word I hadn’t heard before – ‘barragem’, Portuguese for dam.”
Residents were instructed to store water in baths, basins and containers to last a month. “We filled a 1,000-litre bin and, a few weeks later, another 2,000 litres from a well out of town. For six weeks, we showered in buckets, used bottled water for brushing our teeth, washing and boiling vegetables, and used tap water for cleaning. Trucks offering free bottled water parked up each day and people queued down the street.
“People stopped going out. The food hospitality industry halted. Starbucks stopped serving because they couldn’t wash the cups.”
In the days that followed, scientists identified toxic metals including arsenic, mercury, nickel and aluminium in the water supply, which was swiftly treated. A December 2021 study of more than 300 people on the impact of those metals on the local population found an “elevated risk to the health of communities living in the surrounding areas”. It included reports of mental health disorders, skin lesions, gastrointestinal disorders, bone pain and malaise, all potentially linked to the disaster.
Knowles remembers a push to get people to trust the water supply. “A lot of the population trust in God, and the church was encouraging people not to panic, but the writing was on the wall,” he says. “I could no longer trust that the water we drank and bathed in, the ground we walked on, was safe. Construction was halted and no one was buying water valves. My business would go; our money would run out.”
Just after Christmas 2015, down to his final £1,000, Knowles bought a flight back to Harrogate in Yorkshire. He arrived in March 2016 with a suitcase and a credit card. Sheila and Enzo stayed in Brazil at her parents’ home. They joined him in England in 2018, as soon as he could afford the air fares.
Knowles, who also has three grownup children and five grandchildren from his first marriage, says: “To leave my son in Brazil ripped me apart inside. I was scared that if they didn’t leave, they would die. I had to go back to England and earn us money. I couldn’t sit around waiting for a miracle.”
He took a washing-up job, living on £1 a day: “I would hang around the ‘sell-by’ shelf in Asda waiting for the final bits to be reduced to 10p. I’d fill my bag with whatever turned up.
“I saved up to renew my bus and lorry licences, then got my old job back with the bus company. I was concentrating on survival; there was no time to fall to pieces.”
He slept on a friend’s sofa, then rented a cheap spare room, where he still lives. Sheila, 52, and Enzo, now 10, live in a small rental 10 minutes away. It is the only living arrangement the family can afford.
Knowles says: “Getting them to Britain was a huge step. Before they came, we’d communicate daily over WhatsApp. I’d try to explain to Sheila my longterm health fears for Enzo. People were sharing images on social media groups of rashes they’d developed and fish with disfigurements you’d expect from a nuclear incident. I tried to explain that what affected fish today could have a legacy on humans in the future.”
The court case, he says, is his only hope of reuniting his family under one roof. The legal fight was launched in 2018 by the international law firm PGMBM on behalf of its 200,000-plus claimants. The case was struck out by the high court in January 2021, after a challenge by BHP, and then by the court of appeal in March 2021, in support of BHP’s case that claims as well as a special compensation scheme were already under way in Brazil.
However, appeal judges granted a rare opportunity to reopen the case last July, paving the way for another ruling, due in April. Judges described the case as one of “exceptional importance, both because of the number of claimants and the importance to them of obtaining such compensation as they may prove to be entitled to”.
The court added “that on any view the situation facing the court was a difficult and novel one” and it “would benefit from full and thorough consideration by this court”. BHP has maintained that the proceedings do not belong in the UK.
Knowles’s family have received no compensation in Brazil, where Samarco, BHP and Vale established the Renova Foundation to mitigate the environmental consequences of the collapse and to provide compensation for individuals and some small businesses for loss and damages. It is intended to provide full redress but has been criticised over its constitution, speed and fairness, the court of appeal heard. The court also noted deficiencies in the Brazilian justice system.
BHP told the Guardian that, by November 2021, Renova had spent more than 19.6bn Brazilian reals (£2.6bn) on environmental and economic reparations and rehabilitation projects, including R$7.78bn in compensation and financial aid to 359,000 people. They introduced a new simplified indemnity system in August.
The Knowles family home is still standing but they have been unable to sell it. “What happened can’t be repaired or put back, so it comes back down to survival. My family and I no longer have a place of our own to live; we lost the most fundamental thing – a roof over our heads.
“To see this case through and be awarded enough money for a deposit, to start again, properly, that’s all we dare hope for.”
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