At least 25 people are missing after two dams burst at an iron mine in southeastern Brazil and unleashed a torrent of mud.
Advertisement
“What we’re seeing is maybe three to six people, at the most 10 people, who are missing from Bento”, he said ahead of an official briefing scheduled on Saturday.
Fire officials say the official number of missing stands at 23.
The public prosecutor’s office has said it may file criminal charges against Samarco, which is jointly owned by the Brazilian mining company Vale and Australia’s BHP Billiton, over the facility’s lack of an emergency siren.
In a statement, BHP Billiton CEO Andrew Mackenzie said he would visit the incident site this week to meet with the Samarco response team, authorities and members of the community to understand first-hand the human, environmental and operational effects of the incident.
A dozen residents of nearby villages remain missing, along with 13 workers from the mine, but only one death has been confirmed in what the governor of mineral-rich Minas Gerais described as the state’s worst environmental disaster. The town almost 80 kilometers downstream was flooded by the 60 million cubic meters of waste water and mud.
The two most devastated villages in the Mariana municipality are Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo, where few buildings were left standing after the mudslide struck. “At the moment we removed the last household appliance, the mud had taken over the whole house”.
“We saw him coming with the two children, but he wasn’t able to hold on to them”, Marlon Celio, 19, a neighbor, told the newspaper. Instead, it said it called the civil defense authorities, a few families and community leaders to warn them.
“The dam has burst, the dam has burst”, the labourer is said to have shouted as he ran to the village.
There are fears that the iron ore residue in the mud poses a health risk.
The operation, which was producing at an annual rate of about 30 million metric tons in September, uses water-filled pipelines to transport ore from its mines to processing plants near its port. It provides pellets, used in steel output, to about 20 countries, with dominant markets in the USA and Europe, according to researcher AME Group.
Advertisement
At a time when iron ore prices have collapsed compared with historic highs in recent years, cleanup and other costs related to the disaster, including regulatory penalties and any litigation Samarco may face, are expected to be high.
