For the Krenak indigenous people who live along the Rio Doce in southeastern Brazil, the waterway was their community’s lifeblood, a source of food and spiritual presence, where children were baptized and learned to swim.
But in 2015, a dam co-owned by BHP Group and Vale SA collapsed, unleashing 44-million cubic meters of mining waste into the river and Atlantic Ocean, 650 km away, in what became Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.