RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s petrochemical big Braskem mentioned Friday it had reached a $356 million settlement with a coastal metropolis the place 4 many years of the corporate’s rock salt mining destroyed 5 city neighborhoods and displaced tens of hundreds of individuals.
Round 200,000 individuals within the Alagoas state’s capital of Maceio had been affected by the extreme extraction of rock salt, based on the Brazil Senate’s web site. Lately, a number of Maceio communities grew to become ghost cities as residents accepted Braskem’s payouts to relocate.
The settlement — about 1.7 billion Brazilian reais — between Braskem and Maceio will likely be used for structural works within the metropolis and for a residents’ help fund, the municipality mentioned in a press release. The settlement doesn’t invalidate negotiations between Braskem and the residents of the affected areas, it added.
The corporate has to date paid over 3.7 billion reais ($775 million) in numerous compensations, together with monetary support, Braskem mentioned earlier this month. It mentioned that Friday’s settlement “represents yet one more essential advance” within the situation of Alagoas.
In accordance with Braskem, over 17,000 residents — or over 90% of all residents that the corporate plans to compensate — and over 5,000 companies had obtained compensation by the tip of June.
Native activists had been much less enthusiastic following Friday’s announcement.
Pastor Wellington Santos on the Baptist church in Pinheiro, one of many affected neighborhoods, mentioned he acknowledges the funds will likely be used to “modernize the town and make it much more lovely,” however puzzled whether or not any amount of cash might compensate for the destruction.
Alexandre Sampaio, who heads an affiliation of the mining victims, mentioned the total prolong of the mining injury is troublesome to grasp.
“The actual measurement of the injury brought on to the well being, schooling, social help, infrastructure, city mobility, materials and immaterial historic heritage isn’t clear,” Sampaio mentioned.
Braskem is without doubt one of the largest petrochemical firms within the Americas, owned primarily by Brazilian state-run oil firm Petrobras and development big Novonor, previously referred to as Odebrecht.
Petrobras is at the moment negotiating a possible sale of Braskem.
Rock salt mining is a strategy of extracting salt from deep underground deposits. Nevertheless, brine-filled cavities left behind when the salt has been extracted can ultimately collapse, inflicting the soil above to settle. Constructions constructed on high of such areas can topple.