At least 15 people were killed when an iron ore tailing dam collapsed in Minas Gerais state in Brazil.
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More than a dozen people have been killed after a dam burst in Brazil.
Five others were injured, said union official Ronaldo Bento.
The village is about seven kilometres (just over four miles) below the dam and TV footage showed the town overrun with flood water and clay-red mud.
“We need rigor in determining what happened”, Minas Gerais prosecutor Carlos Eduardo Ferreira Pinto told reporters. Police, firefighters and local officials said they could not confirm any deaths.
The mine is a 50-50 joint venture between BHP and operator and Brazilian miner Samarco Mineracao SA. In a note to clients, the Australian bank said that the dam failure is a major concern and could have “a material impact on the near-term production outlook for Samarco”. “It is dark. There is a lot of mud”.
Tailings dams sometimes hold chemicals, adding to fears of potential contamination of the nearby Gualaxo do Norte river, but Samarco said there were no chemical elements presenting health risks. Samarco isn’t directly run by the global mining giants, but is operated as a separate company, with BHP and Vale joint shareholders.
“When day does break (in Brazil) our biggest imperative is to secure the safety of the community and obviously our workforce and then to start planning how we can restore the community to health in the wake of this bad accident”, he said.
According to a statement on its website, Samarco is “mobilizing every effort to prioritize the care and integrity of the people who were working in or living near the dams, in addition to actions to curb environmental damage”. “We can not get closer because of the mud”, he told AFP by phone Thursday.
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A statement from the city hall of Mariana, a city of about 40,000 people 300km (185 miles) north of Rio de Janeiro, said the dam ruptured at 4.20pm in an area roughly 20km from the city centre.
