It could cost the mine’s owners a fortune to clean up and fix.
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Civil defence authorities in Mariana said it was evacuating about 600 people to higher ground from the village of Bento Rodrigues, where television footage showed dozens of homes destroyed by the mudslide. Search helicopters buzzed overhead as rescuers tried to save a horse trapped in the mud.
Beside those, however, he said as many as 10 inhabitants of Bento Rodrigues are unaccounted for.
No warning sirens went off, company officials say. Officials said two people were killed, four were injured and 13 were missing.
Andrew Mackenzie, the chief executive of BHP, said in Melbourne, “most of what happened there has been under the clock of darkness. We don’t even know that we’ll find everybody”, said firefighter Adão Severino Junio.
He said however that an undetermined number of people remain unaccounted for in nearby Bento Rodrigues, a village with a population of about 620.
The mine operator Samarco is jointly owned by the Brazilian mining company Vale and Australia’s BHP Billiton. Samarco produces 30 million tonnes per year of pellet, used to make steel.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts said that “given the relevancy of Samarco’s production to the seaborne Pellet market and the uncertainty about potential production disruptions, quality premiums for all materials could rise in the short term, including pellet, lumps and fines”.
“It impossible to calculate now, but it is not going to be cheap”, said Danilo Miranda, of the Marcelo Tostes law firm.
The local Mariana miners’ union said the sludge was toxic, but the company operating the mine, Samarco, said it was “inert” and contained no harmful chemicals. BHP shares fell by up to 5.4 per cent on the local bourse on Friday and more than 4 per cent in London as investors fretted about the damage.
Besides leveling everything in its path, the avalanche caused “enormous environmental damage”, an investigator with the Minas Gerais state prosecutor’s office, Carlos Ferreira Pinto, said.
The CEO of BPH Billiton announced Friday that his company has “offered our full assistance to the Samarco team, and the local authorities, to manage the immediate rescue efforts and help first with the clean-up and then the investigation”.
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The cause of the accident was not known, but a seismology lab at the University of Brasilia reported that several small tremors were registered in the area hours ahead of the disaster, according to O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper.
