Brazil dam collapse kills seven, more than hundred missing

Monitoring Desk

RIO DE JANERIO: At least seven people were killed and more than a one hundred others have gone missing after a dam collapsed in southeast Brazil on Friday.

According to details, after the tailings dam burst the rescue operations were launched to search more than 200 missing people.

Brumadinho Town Mayor Avimar de Melo Barcelos said that seven bodies had been recovered by nightfall, adding that the death was toll expected to rise sharply.

Emergency teams rescued scores of trapped people by helicopter.

However, Vale Chief Executive Fabio Schvartsman said only one-third of the roughly 300 workers at the site of the disaster had been accounted for.

While talking to media at Vale’s offices in Rio de Janeiro, the chief said that “The environmental impact should be much less, but the human tragedy is horrible.” He said that equipment had shown the dam was stable on January 10 and it was too soon to say why it collapsed.

Fire brigade spokesperson Lieutenant Pedro Aihara told the media that “Our main worry now is to quickly find out where the missing people are,” Aihara said that scores of people were trapped in nearby areas flooded by the river of sludge released by the dam failure.

According to reports, the break caused a sea of muddy sludge to spread across rural areas of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais state, burying buildings and vehicles.

Helicopters plucked people covered in mud from the disaster area, including a woman with a fractured hip who was among eight injured people taken to the hospital, officials said.

US-listed shares of Vale tumbled as much as 10 per cent after the incident, the second major disaster at a Brazilian tailings dam involving Vale in just over three years.

Both disasters hit Minas Gerais, which is still recovering from the collapse of a larger dam in November 2015 that killed 19 people.

That dam, owned by a joint venture between Vale and BHP Billiton called Samarco Mineracao SA, buried a nearby village and devastated a major river with toxic waste in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.