Abstract
Will it be possible, sometime in the future, to exactly explain what happened in the dam failure in Brumadinho? Although word "exactness" is often used within the world of engineering, it is often known to be an euphemism. The engineering art consists in projecting, building, implementing and managing different types of systems which might have both positive and negative consequences for workers, society and the environment. Some event or series of events culminated in the dam failure. Is tailings dam engineering aware of and able to control all possible events which together might cause a failure? There are two possible paths: one involves absolute knowledge - engineering has absolute knowledge of everything and is able to design projects in a way to avoid any harmful event. According to the other, while engineering does not have absolute knowledge of all the phenomena, its traditional know-how (empirical knowledge) and wide margins of safety make the odds of dam failure come close to zero. No one projects a dam just to fail. But dams are projected without absolute control of all possible events. When the entire situation is known, all that should be done to avoid failures is 100% known - and the price fixed. However, this never happens, the probability of the occurence of events are never completely known, they are not deterministic and uncertainty is always a fact.