Unemployed construction worker Renato Martins was playing cards with his friends in the middle of the afternoon of 5 November in Bento Ro...
Unemployed construction worker Renato Martins was playing cards with his friends in the middle of the afternoon of 5 November in Bento Rodrigues, a small rural district of Minas Gerais state in south-west Brazil.
They heard a loud bang coming from the north, but paid little attention to it. Minutes later his neighbours started shouting that one of the dams in a nearby mine had burst.
Everyone was overcome with panic. Renato went to the house where his wife and baby were and took them to higher ground. There he managed to scramble them into a truck that drove away to the centre of the town of Mariana.
