A dam burst Thursday at a mining waste site in Brazil, unleashing a deluge of thick, red toxic mud that smothered a village and killed at least 17 people, an official said.
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Adao Severino Junior, fire chief of the nearby city Mariana, said there were over 50 injured victims and at least 40 missing people.
Television footage showed a torrent of muck several hundred metres long that had swamped houses and ripped off their roofs.
The company, which is jointly owned by the Australia’s BHP Billiton and Vale of Brazil, also warned people to stay away from the area for the time being.
Shares of Vale closed down 5.7 percent in Sao Paulo trading and BHP Billiton also dropped 5.7 percent in New York.
“What we’re seeing is maybe three to six people, at the most 10 people, that are missing from Bento”, he said ahead of a formal briefing scheduled on Saturday. Mr Mackenzie said he couldn’t comment on possible fatalities or what role weather conditions had played in the incident. Then the dams broke: “It was like an natural disaster started”.
The dam was built to handle mining residue from a nearby mining operation.
Miner Andrew Oliveira managed to escape.
Firefighters and other emergency teams rushed to the scene and residents were ordered to evacuate.
Mining accidents aren’t uncommon in the region. “You had a town downstream of this tailings dam which should never have been there”.
But such events are a rarity for mining giant BHP, which prides itself on high safety standards. The reservoirs are composed primarily of sand and inert tailings, a mining waste product of metal filings, it said. There were no serious injuries.
“We took what we could and ran upstairs”, said Trinidade.
State prosecutor Carlos Eduardo Ferreira Pinto said he will recommend the governor suspend Samarco’s environmental license for its operations in the region. The venture makes up about 5 per cent of Vale’s revenue, according to Moniz. Macquarie values Samarco at $US6.2 billion.
“The dam failure is a major concern and could have a material impact on the near-term production outlook for Samarco”, analysts at the firm wrote in a report on Friday. The mine provides about 15 percent of the world’s exports of iron ore pellets, used to make steel, according to BTG. Iron ores prices were not affected and continued to fall on Friday.
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Samarco, which churned out 25 million metric tons of mostly pellets a year ago, uses water-filled pipelines to transport ore from its mines in the states of Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo to processing plants near its port.
