Discussion Case: The Vale Mining Company Dam Collapse by Vale burst, leaving 19 dead. communities. structurally unsound. TUV SUD employees expressed worry about losing contracts with Vale, its major client, if their reports did not verify the dam's safety. the dam. "They paid little attention to us, they didn't believe what we were saying." the dam. An internal company document showed that Vale mapped out areas that would be affected if some of its dams burst. The document estimated that the Brumadinho dam could cost the company about $1.5 billion if it burst and more than 100 people could die. Lawyers defending Vale denied the allegations that the dam's managers and engineers cut back on safety measures or knew the dam could collapse, noting they would have been risking their own lives. Relatives of workers buried by the mudslide said they presumed a warning siren would go off, giving them time to escape. In the months before the collapse, Vale held a practice evacuation for mine workers and residents. Participants were told where to run if the siren went off and how many minutes they would have to get to a safety point if the dam ruptured. "My friend's daughter was distraught. They told her she had two minutes but she couldn't run it in less than five," said Anastacia do Carmo Silva, whose son Cleiton was working in the mine's vehicle workshop when the mud hit. Cleiton was very athletic, and he easily reached the safety point in the training session. But not one siren was heard the day of the Vale dam collapse, and Cleiton was killed. His body so mangled that he could only be identified by his DNA. Like many small towns in the region, Brumadinho relied heavily on mining. This may explain why some employees were hesitant to express their concerns over the dam's safety. Some community members said they might have died in the country's poor public hospitals if not for the private health insurance offered by Vale to its employees and family members. "We talked about the problems at the dam a lot among ourselves, but people were afraid of raising the issues with the bosses," said Helio Goncalves, a retired Vale worker. "There is no way what happened in Brumadinho can be treated as an accident," said Marcelo Kokke, prosecutor with the Federal Attorney General Office who investigated the tragedy. "If preventive measures had been taken in a consistent way, the disaster could have been avoided, or at least it wouldn't have taken on the proportions that it did." Prosecutors believed the company's profit-sharing system may have encouraged some managers to keep costs down. Under this arrangement, managers received an annual bonus of several times their monthly salary, depending on the company's performance. Prosecutors believe that this compensation system and the frequent rotation of staff were partly to blame for the sequence of events that led to the disaster. Vale denied that the profit-sharing system gave staff an incentive to reduce dam management costs, saying that the pay was dependent, among other things, on health and safety standards. One contractor at the Brumadinho mine recalled how he asked a manager for equipment to improve drainage at the dam that would cost about $1,200. The manager denied the request and said jokingly that he would be fired if he approved it. After the dam collapsed, Vale and TUV SUD said they were cooperating in the investigation and conducting their own inquiries. TUV SUD released a statement saying there was "heightened uncertainty" about whether the safety audits provided a reliable declaration of the stability of the dam. A Vale spokesperson said the company relied on the contractors it hired and their employees. "Vale is committed to the safety of its structures and has a structured system to manage the dams that includes several technical and governance actions." FIGURE 6.1 The Components of Ethical Climates a) Using Figure 6.1, how would you classify the ethical climate at Vale? In what way did it contribute to the mine collapse? What ethical climate might have prevented the dam collapse? b) What ethical safeguards were present at Vale at the time of the dam collapse? Why did they not prevent the dam collapse? c) What additional ethical safeguards were needed at Vale that could have prevented, or mitigated the harms from, the dam collapse? d) What role did the relationship between Vale and TUV SUD play in the dam disaster? Did TUV SUD have a conflict of interest, and if so, what was the conflict? e) Why did Vale's employees and members of the community not advocate effectively for improvements in the dam's safety