Life Inside a Sinking City

Résumé détaillé

Years of mining hallowed the ground beneath Maceió, Brazil. As the place sinks, those who’ve stayed confront the surreal challenges of hanging on.

Years of mining hallowed the ground beneath Maceió, Brazil. As the place sinks, those who’ve stayed confront the surreal challenges of hanging on.

David Rafael da Silva Santos felt the ground shake under him. It was March 3, 2018, and Santos, then 14, was playing soccer in the streets of Maceió, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil. His grandfather had taught him to feel with his feet when he was learning to hunt for sururu, the mussels that locals dig with their toes out of the city’s Mundaú Lagoon. But he’d never felt anything like this. “I remember the fear,” Santos told me recently when I visited him in Maceió. “Before that, I’d never even heard of Braskem.”

Braskem, the largest petrochemical company in Latin America, and its subsidiaries had for more than 40 years mined under the lagoon for rock salt, used to make chlorine and the plastic polymer PVC. Now the ground was shuddering due to subsidence caused by widespread perforation of the lagoon floor, as a study by the Geological Survey of Brazil later revealed. What Santos was feeling was a 2.4 magnitude earthquake in a country that doesn’t have significant earthquakes. Maceió was sinking.

Like a slow-motion avalanche, the devastation to an area of around 890 acres has gradually, relentlessly, upturned lives in this city of about a million people. When one of Braskem’s mines partially collapsed a few years ago in the same area near the lagoon, local news reported a crater opening in the sururu-filled water. Sidewalks and streets have buckled, and houses across five large neighborhoods along the lagoon have cracked open, leaving jagged gashes in interior walls. More than 60,000 residents have been displaced and 14,000 properties abandoned, triggering a housing frenzy as prices in nearby neighborhoods have boomed, making it difficult for families to find new homes.

In response, the city government declared the affected neighborhoods uninhabitable.

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