So far four are confirmed dead and at least another 22 are still missing.
Advertisement
Searcher and rescue teams used small airplanes and a drone Saturday to scour the landscape searching for at least 19 people missing in the mine-rich state of Minas Gerais.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has said authorities will direct their efforts at finding more than twenty missing people and will probe into the cause of the accident.
“We can say with certainty that 13 people were at the site at the moment of the collapse, and it is hard to see how they could be found alive”.
This AFP image taken on November 8, 2015, shows a partial view of mud-covered village of Bento Rodrigues, three days after an avalanche of mud and mining sludge buried the town in southeastern Brazil.
A new mining code being proposed in Brazil will include stricter regulations for tailings pond dams and could make dry processing of iron ore obligatory for miners, the bill’s reviewer, Congressman Leonardo Quintão, told Reuters yesterday.
The cost to the companies, including for cleanup and rebuilding, could top US$1 billion, said Paul Young, a Sydney-based analyst at Deutsche Bank, who estimated the mine could be closed until about 2019.
On Sunday, the Public Ministry of Minas Gerais state (MP MG), a body of independent public prosecutors, ordered Samarco to pay a temporary compensation to the families of the victims.
BHP’s CEO, Andrew Mackenzie, reportedly flew to Brazil on Monday to gain a better understanding of the human, environmental and operational impacts of the incident.
And if Samarco production is removed from the remaining eight months of this year, then BHP’s full year iron ore guidance should be revised down about 8 million tonnes to 241.
The lack of a warning siren or an emergency plan for evacuating villages near the dams is a constant complaint of those hit by the floods and something prosecutors say they will pursue.
Executives have said a tremor in the vicinity of the mine may have caused the dams to burst, but it was too early to establish the exact cause.
Carlos Eduardo Ferreira Pinto said the Thursday breaches of the dams at the Samarco iron ore mine, which all but erased a nearby hamlet and contaminated the water source for hundreds of thousands of people downstream, were “no accident”.
The contaminated mud, which is said to be filled with mine wastes, has also poured into a river in the area, polluting the water supply of several cities.
Tailings: The dam was holding “tailings” which is a mining waste product of metal filings.
“We lost everything”, she said.
Advertisement
Samarco must also provide a helicopter for an indefinite period of time to inspect areas affected by the almost 60 million cubic meters (two billion cubic feet) of ochre sludge.
