The head of the Mariana fire fighters, Adao Severino Junior, said Friday there were at least 17 dead, while the local mining union reported that 15 people lost their lives.
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People in the small village of Bento Rodrigues downhill from the dams said a deafening clap was the only hint they got that a sea of viscous, clay-red mud was about to hit.
Cars could be seen piled on top of what remained of houses, and mountains of mud stood where previously there had been plazas and highways.
Samarco is a 50-50 venture between BHP Billiton and Brazil’s Vale.
Firefighters searched the ruins of Bento Rodrigues, a village of a few 600 people near the south-eastern city of Mariana in the historic mining region of Minas Gerais. The department said four people were injured and another 13 missing, though it warned that the latter figure could rise.
Authorities on Thursday said one dam at the Samarco iron ore mining operation had burst roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the city of Mariana, which is 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of Rio de Janeiro. “No dam bursts by chance”.
While it was still unclear what caused the collapses, Samarco said on Saturday that workers were doing normal scheduled work on one of the dams to increase its size when it burst, sweeping them away in the flood.
Speaking at a news conference Friday, Pimentel called it “a bad scene, an environmental tragedy” and said the accident was the “biggest natural disaster in the history of our state”.
A Minas Gerais state prosecutor in charge of environmental crimes, Carlos Ferreira Pinto, said he would seek a temporary suspension of Samarco’s license on Monday. Rescue teams were searching for bodies or survivors and residents living around the town of Mariana were told to evacuate to higher ground.
Samarco CEO Ricardo Vescovi said the company had been working on the drainage system for the dams.
Shares of Vale were off 4.3 percent in Sao Paulo trading and BHP Billiton dropped 7.6 percent in London. BHP Billiton and Vale already face the lowest iron ore prices in a decade.
The incident raises the question of why people were living in the area, Saleem Ali, a professor at the University of Queensland’s Center for Social Responsibility in Mining, said by phone Friday.
“It’s still far too premature to come out with any concrete conclusions, and we still wait for further investigations and a position from Vale to better understand implications”, BTG Pactual SA analyst Leonardo Correa said in a note. Holding tailings, a mining waste product of metal filings, water and occasionally chemicals.
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The cause of the disaster was not confirmed, but one seismological expert said small tremors had been detected in the area on Thursday.
