Chapter 1 - Construction

A $13-billion enterprise

By Marcelo Leite

Dimmi Amora

Morris Kachani

Lalo de Almeida

Rodrigo Machado

In Altamira, Pará (Northern Brazil)

English version: Michael Kepp Marcelo LeiteDimmi AmoraMorris KachaniLalo de AlmeidaRodrigo MachadoIn Altamira, Pará (Northern Brazil)

The 6:00 a.m. explosion blasts a nine-meter-thick layer off a block of migmatite in a 750-square-meter area where century-old trees had thrived in this patch of Amazon rainforest near the cities of Altamira and Vitória do Xingu (state of Pará, Brazil). When the dust clears, all that’s left of this hard, granite-like rock is a huge mound of rubble. By midnight, not even a boulder will be among the remains.

Two bulldozers sit side by side, 50 meters apart. After each one lifts five loads in less than three minutes, they have filled an off-road truck with 32 metric tons of rock. As one leaves, another arrives. Within 20 minutes, 18 of these rock-filled dump trucks have left, with not a second to spare.

The frenetic pace of men and machines marks the excavation of a 20-kilometer-long canal through which 14 million liters of water per second will be diverted from the Xingu River, with a flow rate almost 140 times greater than the canal that diverts water from the São Francisco River, another major waterway. Water from the Xingu River will power the turbines of the third largest dam in the world, and also among the most controversial: Belo Monte, being built by the Norte Energia S.A. consortium.

When fully operational, the dam will generate up to 11,233 megawatts (MW) of electricity. Its installed capacity is sufficient to illuminate the homes of at least 18 million people. In terms of generating capacity, only China’s Three Gorges dam (22,720 MW) and the binational (Brazil/Paraguay) Itaipu dam (14,000 MW) are bigger.

According to the Energy Research Company (EPE), the research arm of the Mines and Energy Ministry, Brazil needs to annually add 6,350 MW of electricity by 2022 to its current generating capacity of 121,000 MW (70% of which is produced by hydroelectric plants). If Belo Monte could generate at full capacity all year round, it would provide one-fifth of that additional power that the country will need by then. But it will generate at full capacity only four months per year.

Most of the generating capacity (11,000 MW) of the dam will be installed in its main powerhouse, near the village of Belo Monte do Pontal, whose construction is 47% complete. The main dam, technically speaking, will be 60 kilometers upriver, in the middle of the Big Bend of the Xingu River, at the Pimental construction site. That dam will divert water into the canal that will fill a 130-square-kilometer reservoir between it and the main downriver powerhouse. Six turbines of an auxiliary powerhouse along the spillway of the Pimental dam will generate up to 233 MW of additional power.

Its peak capacity of 11,233 MW can only be reached between February and May, when the Xingu reaches its maximum flow rate. During the other months, the turbines will be gradually turned off. Between these high and low generating periods, Belo Monte is expected to guarantee an average 4,571 MW of power, or only 41% of its installed capacity.

“Before energy generation can begin, all this [excavation] must be completed”, said 35-year-old, civil engineer Roberta Martinelli Pimentel Pereira, pointing to the canal, wide enough to easily fit 60 trucks, parked side by side.

Belo Monte needs to start producing energy in February 2015, when the first turbine in the auxiliary powerhouse begins to operate, but this objective faces a three-month delay. Afterwards, from March of 2016 to January of 2019, the main powerhouse’s 18 turbines will gradually be started up –delays can’t occur in this case. In fact, Norte Energia is operating under the assumption that, from the fourth or fifth turbine on, it can install the turbines ahead of schedule, enabling all of them to be functioning before the contractual deadline. This means considerable gains for the consortium.

Currently, Roberta Pereira’s greatest challenge is to reign under control the water from the igarapés (streams) that cross the path of the gigantic canal to, this very December, complete a temporary dike of rocks and dirt to divert water away from the Xingu River and keep the canal construction site isolated from it. This slim engineer is in charge of 7,000 employees and has logged 12 years “in the trenches”, a reference to the major infrastructure projects in which she has been involved. Foundations for the dike have been completed, and most of it has reached the safety level of 95 m.

Work at Belo Monte occurs at a feverish pace 24-hours-per-day, two-and-one-half years after its construction officially began in June 2011. The dam, with an estimated cost of R$ 30 billion (about $ 13 billion), faces a fast-approaching, 44-month deadline for power generation to begin. Itaipu faced a 120-month deadline, the Santo Antônio dam, on the Madeira River faced an estimated 52-month deadline, but it began to generate electricity nine months ahead of schedule.

Communication problems

Belo Monte reached a manpower peak in October, when 25,000 laborers (87% of them men) were working on it. Around 75% of Brazil’s over 5,600 municipalities have a population smaller than this army of workers. From towns much smaller than the construction site of the dam came João, José, Antônio, Pedro and Joaquim (who ask that their real names not be mentioned). Sitting together on a Sunday afternoon on the sidewalk of João Rodrigues Avenue, in the city of Altamira, they drink a mix of vodka and a lemon-flavored soft drink. They arrived a little over one month ago and are already thinking of leaving. For them, Belo Monte has been one big disappointment. “Our salary, compared to what other states pay, is down here”, says João, with his index finger near the ground.

João is no novice dam-builder. In 2011, he worked on the Santo Antônio dam on the Madeira River. He says that there, his income ranged between R$ 1,700 and R$ 1,800 per month ($740-780). At Belo Monte, his beginning salary was no more than R$ 1,200 per month ($520). A maximum of 10 additional hours of work per week, negotiated between the Belo Monte Construction Consortium (CCBM) and Sintrapav (the Pará state union of heavy-construction workers), prevents employees housed at construction sites from working more than 54 hours per week and from thus increasing their paychecks.

Over two-thirds of the workers come from outside Altamira, the city nearest the dam. Isolation from their families is aggravated by the construction site’s having telecom signal connections provided only by one operator, Oi, among whose main shareholders is Andrade Gutierrez, the head of CCBM contractors (which also include Odebrecht and Camargo Corrêa). Those with mobile phones from other telecom operators have a hard time talking with their wives and children. The most persistent discover that they can pick up traces of a signal on the hill where the water tower is located near the Canal site housing quarters, where they can be seen with their mobile phones tied to stakes driven into the ground.

According to a Datafolha opinion poll, which interviewed 246 dam workers in Altamira, most of them are married (51%) and only 40% have spouses living in the city. Two out of three Belo Monte workers have been there less than one year and at least half of them don’t plan to stay. They only came in search of a job (38% of them have worked on other dams in Brazil).

Workers’s lodgings at Canais, one of the three construction sites of Belo Monte - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

In a hill close to the Canais site, a worker’s mobile is tied to a pole in order to stabilize the faint signal there - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

After stabilizing the signal, a construction worker can finally talk to his family - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

One of the many cafeterias built at the construction sites that employ 25,000 workers and engineers - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

Workers at play in the recreational area of the Canais lodgings - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

Workers at play in the recreational area of the Canais lodgings - Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

The housing quarters have dorms that sleep no more than four people, with air conditioning, internal bathrooms and hot water. Dozens of such rooms comprise the so-called “condominiums”, which can only be entered with the correct magnetic ID card. Around internal patios separating condominiums, wire fences isolate the dorms. The recreational options include watching TV or films, going to the gym, playing pool, dominoes or table soccer (in which players use soccer figures mounted on rotating bars to “kick” the ball into the opposing goal, by twirling the bars). There are areas for religious-cult worship and rooms with computers. A 200-seat cinema is about to be opened.

According to Datafolha, 57% of the dam workers live in construction-site housing. Most of them approve of the housing’s comfort (89% rate it either excellent or good), cleanliness (an 84% rating), organization (71%), and recreational options (70%). Opinions are divided only about the quality of the meals: 45% say they are excellent or good, and 45% say they are average.

Workers’ strikes, like the one that stopped all the construction work by the end of November, indigenous peoples’ protests, court-issued suspensions of construction, and environmental licensing problems, can delay Norte Energia’s timetable for starting power generation. As part of a contract signed with the government, the fine for noncompliance with the deadline for generating power is up to 2% of the dam’s annual revenues.

Norte Energia also has to buy from other companies the energy that it can’t deliver, at a cost of up to R$ 1 million ($435,000) per day for each turbine not yet operating, depending on the market price of power at the time. Taxpayers would have to shoulder this financial loss because, even though Belo Monte was planned as a private-sector project, at the end of the day the dam is owned by the government. It’s not by chance that the federal National Security Force (specially-trained military policemen and firefighters) takes part in monitoring the undertaking.

In 2010, when Norte Energia won the auction to build and operate Belo Monte, it was little more than an agglomeration of medium-sized civil construction and energy companies (Bertin, Queiroz Galvão, J. Malucelli, Cetenco, Galvão Engenharia, Mendes Júnior and Serveng), along with state-owned companies led by Chesf (the São Francisco River hydroelectric company). Since then, the group’s composition has evolved into an association of state-run companies and pension funds who hired contractors that placed losing bids at the dam’s concession auction. All of these firms are part of the CCBM consortium.