Rescue teams searched for a third day Saturday for survivors of an avalanche of mud and mining sludge that buried a village in southeastern Brazil, as authorities tried to pin down the number of dead and missing.
Hundreds of firefighters, soldiers and civil defense workers probed for signs of life in the sea of mud unleashed Thursday when waste reservoirs burst at the partly Australian-owned Samarco iron ore mine.
Authorities have given contradictory information on the toll.
The mayor of Mariana, the nearest city in the state of Minas Gerais, said Saturday the official toll was one dead and 13 missing, all of them mine workers.
Beside those, however, he said as many as 10 inhabitants of Bento Rodrigues are unaccounted for. The village has a population of about 620.
“There is only one confirmed death so far, but it is logical that (the number) will surely rise,” he said.
He said officials were interviewing residents to get a fix on the missing “but we haven’t been able to arrive at a figure.”
“It’s not a very high number. What we’re seeing with the families, it is three to six people, 10 at most, who are missing,” he added.
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.
The cascade of debris began with the collapse of a dike at a reservoir holding 55 million cubic meters of mining waste, which spilled into an adjoining valley.
A short time later, another reservoir with seven million cubic meters of water broke, and the mass of liquid sludge swept over Bento Rodrigues two kilometers away.
“There was a horrible noise and we saw the mud approaching. We ran for it. It is a miracle that we are still alive,” said Valeria de Souza, 20, with a baby in her arms and tears in her eyes.
About 500 people were evacuated from the village on Thursday after washing off the mud and mineral residue with soap and water.
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 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.
The head of Samarco’s emergency planning operations, Germano Silva Lopes, told a news conference the company had detected a tremor but no anomalies in the dams before they burst.
Samarco is jointly owned by BHP Billiton of Australia and Vale of Brazil.