Qualla: The Sinking of Maceió https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:25:05 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: The Sinking of Maceió https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio The Sinking of Maceió: Introduction https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Vicente Brasileiro, CC BY 3.0. The first sign was ordinary enough that people photographed it and went to work. In February 2018, after heavy rain, cracks opened in the ground in Pinheiro - a middle-class neighbourhood of Maceió with schools, shops, a church, families who had lived there for generations. Two weeks later an earth tremor shook the district, asphalt caved in on several streets, and the cracks in the walls of houses widened enough that you could see daylight through them. Pinheiro is not on a fault line and does not sit on a floodplain. What was moving was underneath it: a honeycomb of rock-salt cavities mined out beneath the city over decades, and now failing.

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Vicente Brasileiro | CC BY 3.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full The Sinking of Maceió: What Was Under the Neighbourhood https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0. Rock salt lies in thick beds below this part of Maceió, and it was extracted by solution mining - pumping water down, dissolving the halite, drawing the brine back up, and leaving voids behind. Dozens of cavities were worked beneath the northern districts by the petrochemical com...

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-what-was-under-the-neighbourhood.mp3 0:06 2 full The Sinking of Maceió: The Report https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0. It took the state until May 2019 to put a formal finding on the record. The Geological Survey of Brazil - the CPRM, a federal research body under the Ministry of Mines and Energy - presented its report at the Federal Court in Alagoas and concluded that the ground movement in Mace...

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-the-report.mp3 0:06 3 full The Sinking of Maceió: The Emptying https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0. What followed has no real precedent in urban Brazil. Five neighbourhoods - Pinheiro, Mutange, Bebedouro, Bom Parto and part of Farol - were progressively condemned and evacuated. Estimates of the human scale vary because nobody set out to count this in advance: figures from the c...

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-the-emptying.mp3 0:06 4 full The Sinking of Maceió: Mutange, December 2023 https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0. For five years the disaster moved at the speed of geology, which is to say slowly enough that it kept slipping out of the national news. Then, on 30 November 2023, Maceió declared a 180-day state of emergency over the imminent collapse of a mine beneath Mutange. A perimeter went ...

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-mutange-december-2023.mp3 0:06 5 full The Sinking of Maceió: Ledgers, Courts, and What Cannot Be Compensated https://qualla.com/sinking-of-maceio/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0. Braskem has not officially accepted that it caused the disaster. It has nonetheless signed agreements in the Alagoas courts committing more than twelve billion reais to compensating residents and business owners and to relocating public facilities such as schools and health units...

Read more: The Sinking of Maceió on Qualla

Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/7/n/q/9/sinking-of-maceio-wp/7nq9-the-sinking-of-macei-ledgers-courts-and-what-cannot-be-compensated.mp3 0:06 6 full