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 the advancing torrent threatened other communities.
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.
It flattened the nearby village of Bento Rodrigues, and has continued its destructive advance, leveling a neighborhood and the main plaza in the town Barra Longa 60 kilometers (35 miles) away but causing no loss of life there, a spokesman for the mayor’s office told AFP.
Authorities have given contradictory information on the toll of dead and missing in and around the village of Bento Rodrigues.
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 nearby 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 number of people 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.
Families, meanwhile, were desperately seeking information about missing loved ones.
– Missing child –
Flyers circulated with the picture of a five-year old named Emanuely, who slipped from her father’s arms as he ran ahead of the torrent carrying her and her two-year- old brother, the newspaper O Globo said.
“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.
“We helped grab him, but lost the girl,” he said.
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.
No warning sirens were sounded, the company said. Instead, it said it called the civil defense authorities, some families and community leaders to warn them.
Panicked villagers ran screaming toward high ground and from there watched as their houses were swallowed in a river of mud.
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 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.