Life Inside a Sinking City
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. The sinking of coastal cities around the globe has become a pressing issue, due largely to the excessive pumping of groundwater. But in Maceió, the crisis has become what Natallya Levino, a professor of finance at the Federal University of Alagoas in Maceió, calls the largest ongoing environmental disaster in any urban area in the world.
In response, the city government declared the affected neighborhoods uninhabitable. Braskem has committed nearly three and a half billion dollars to deal with the crisis, but some residents say the buyouts the company has offered them to relocate have been inadequate. Victims have petitioned local courts to increase the amounts, and some have filed suit in the Netherlands, where Braskem has subsidiaries. In 2024, a Dutch court found the company liable and ordered it to pay a yet-to-be-determined amount of compensation. And in June, a federal court in Brazil allowed a criminal case to proceed against Braskem that alleges irregular extraction methods and misleading environmental studies. In a statement, Braskem maintains that its mining was conducted with proper oversight and “in accordance with the best available practices.” And following the subsidence, the company “has implemented a broad range of initiatives developed in dialogue with public authorities and local communities to support improvements in infrastructure” and other city services.
When I visited recently, the urban clamor died down as I approached the affected area. Maceió is known for its fishermen’s handmade wooden boats, called jangadas, and Caribbean-style beaches. But a haunting, heavy silence pervades the abandoned sections, now lined by a maze of corrugated metal walls. The forest on the edge of the city is slowly blanketing the houses with papaya trees and vines. Braskem has installed surveillance cameras to monitor the empty streets and seismographs to measure vibrations in the soil. Only graffiti recall the former residents’ lives: “Braskem sank our dreams,” reads one message. “We were happy here,” laments another.
Luciene Ferreira de Lima, 50, worked as a teacher for 17 years in a now shuttered school, one of about 40 that have been closed. Today her family is scattered across the city, and she is out of work. Since the disaster, Lima says, she’s had trouble sleeping and sometimes takes medication to calm herself down. A report by the National Committee in Defense of Territories Against Mining attributes a dozen suicides to the fallout of the calamity. Lima sobbed as she told me she has not been able to find work. She was too emotional and cried during a job interview. Her mother died soon after the displacement—of sadness, Lima believes.
New portions of the city continue to be blocked off as construction equipment bulldozes the homes residents left behind. People in neighboring areas carry the pervasive stress of not knowing if they’re next. “The process of subsidence is ongoing,” says Levino. “The ground still isn’t stable.”
Amid victims’ sadness over losing their former homes, some routines endure. Santos occasionally returns to the lagoon to hunt for sururu. A 65-year-old fisherman, Damião Carlos da Silva, and his wife, Luzia, once lived along the water. They recently secured public housing across town, but Silva refuses to move. Instead, he’s set up a clandestine shelter paces from where he fishes. His home, he says, is here.
The nonprofit National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funded the work of National Geographic Explorer and photographer Maíra Erlich featured in this story.
Shannon Sims is a New Orleans–based journalist who has reported from more than 30 countries for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Travel + Leisure.
Maíra Erlich is a Brazilian documentary photographer focused on social matters, human rights, family, and culture. She became a National Geographic Explorer while documenting this story. Her work has been published in Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
