On November 11th, 55 million cubic meters of sludge broke loose from a mining dam near Ouro Preto, and has now contaminated 500 miles of river valley all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In comparison the Hudson River is only 315 miles long.
This unprecedented catastrophe appears to be going unnoticed by the world at large. The only news stories I see in the past 5 days are in Portuguese! To understand the scale of this tragedy think Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Mercury is the most dangerous metal on the planet, other than radiation. If 1000lbs of lead was sitting on your street corner, in 1000 year there would be about 1000lbs of lead. If there was 1000lbs of mercury, it would disperse within a year. The mercury along this river will travel deep into the soil, polluting the groundwater, and it will evaporate into the air, raining down in other places. Mercury loves sulfur, and life on earth is loaded with sulfur, thus it's extremely hard to get out of our bodies. It's an epigenetic, and will be rearrangingchromosomes of the life in that valley for generations.
The mining company is not telling people how much mercury, lead, etc, were in that lake. As the sludge flowed downstream other reservoirs along the way opened up their floodgates. I guess the decision was to dilute the poison.
This may be worse than the Minimata disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
This needs to be on the tip of everyone's tongue.
http://www.mercuryfreekids.org/rio-doce-disaster/