Urban mining in Brazil leads to emptying of communities

MACEIO, Brazil — This part of Maceio, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern Alagoas state, used to buzz with the sounds of cars, commerce and children playing. It went silent as residents evacuated en masse, eager to escape the looming destruction of their homes, which were cracking and crumbling.

Beneath their floors, the subsurface was riddled with dozens of cavities: the legacy of four decades of rock salt mining in five urban neighborhoods. That caused the soil above to settle and structures atop it to start coming apart. Since 2020, the communities have hollowed out as tens of thousands of residents accepted payouts from petrochemical company Braskem to relocate.

Few holdouts remain, several of whom said they imagine the ground under their feet resembling Swiss cheese. Still, Paulo Sergio Doe, 51, said he will never leave his home in the Pinheiro neighborhood where he grew up.

“The company can’t impose what it wants overnight to do away with the lives and histories of so many families,” he said outside his home.

Braskem is one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the Americas.

While the company isn’t forcibly evicting anyone, though, those still here said it feels that way. It reached an agreement with prosecutors and public defenders to compensate families so they could uproot and start over elsewhere. By Braskem’s count, 97.4% of affected homes — more than 14,000 — are now vacant, the company said last week.

The 55,000 evacuees left behind are not just neighbors and friends, but also jobs; 4,500 mostly small- and medium-size businesses that sustained 30,000 people were shuttered, according to a study The Federal University of Alagoas published last year. Among those businesses were a ballet school that operated for 38 years, according to Adriana Capretz, part of the university’s work group to monitor the neighborhoods.

Braskem has disbursed about 40% of the more than about $1 billion it has set aside for relocation, compensation of individuals including residents and local employees and the transfer of facilities like schools and hospitals, the company said last Thursday. It is directing $1.2 billion more for closing and monitoring the salt mines, as well as social, environmental and urbanistic measures.

Wrapping up an earnings call, Braskem’s CEO Roberto Lopes Pontes Simoes highlighted the company’s year, including “all the advance we had in Maceio” in having relocated nearly everyone from the neighborhoods.

Capretz, a professor in the university’s architecture and urbanism school, said that doesn’t mean heartache was avoided.

“The tragedy is happening, not just regarding the geological phenomena but, primarily, because there are cases of people who committed suicide, many who became sick with depression, lost their social lives, family ties, friends and neighbors,” Capretz said.

ERALDO PERES/AP Escape route signs placed by the Braskem mining company line the side of a road this month in Maceio, Brazil. Urban mining is taking a severe toll on homes there.