While officials confirmed only one death since the accident on Thursday, TV Globo reported two bodies were found on a riverbank several kilometers away from the mine.
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The increasingly desperate search was suspended at dusk Saturday because “it is a high-risk area that is hard to access”, said Duarte Goncalves Junior, mayor of the nearby city of Mariana.
Bento Rodrigues, a village of approximately 600 to 2,000, was completely destroyed in as 65ft floodwaters erupted from the broken dams on Thursday.
The most recent official toll, prior to Pimentel’s remarks, was two dead and 28 missing.
The mayor’s office in Mariana said Samarco officials assured them the mining company would pay for the damages, but did not provide details.
All their expenses are covered by Samarco, the operator of the iron ore mine where the dams were undergoing work.
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.
“They didn’t tell us the mud would come through with such force”, said Losangeles Freitas, resident of Barra Longa, a town almost 80 kilometers downstream flooded by the 60 million cubic meters of waste water and mud.
“We lost everything. It moved so fast”, she said. But the waters rose more than 10 meters, he said, sweeping into his home at 3 a.m. – almost half a day after the dam broke. “At the moment we removed the last household appliance, the mud had taken over the whole house. Regrettably, we have to acknowledge that”, Governor Fernando Pimentel told reporters as rescue operations resumed. The dams held back so-called tailings ponds, masses of finely ground waste rock and water that can contain harmful chemicals left over from extracting minerals. Instead, it said it called the civil defense authorities, a few families and community leaders to warn them.
Melbourne-based BHP, the world’s biggest mining company, said Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mackenzie will travel to the scene of the incident this week to meet with Samarco’s response team, authorities and members of affected communities.
Executives have said a tremor in the vicinity of the mine may have caused the dams to burst, but that it was too early to establish the exact cause. While benchmark iron-ore prices extended a year-to-date decline to 32 percent after the incident, a disruption may support the current premium for pellets of about $30 a dry ton.
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The cleanup bill and potential environmental lawsuits could be more costly than the loss of output.
