RIO DE JANEIRO – Officials in Brazil have confirmed that the death toll from a dam collapse on mine last week in the southeast area, has risen to 121 on Saturday, adding that about 226 people are still missing.
After the tailings dam burst the rescue operations were launched to search more than 300 people missing in the collapse.
The emergency service for the state of Minas Gerais said that the search was ongoing for bodies, where the disaster occurred on January 25, adding that all those listed as missing are presumed dead, with no survivors being found over the past week.
Last week, Civil Defense spokesperson Lieutenant Flavio Godinho said that 42 bodies have been identified after five days of an intense search operation through the mud in the Minas Gerais state, where the accident happened.
Earlier, On the of the incident, Brumadinho Town Mayor Avimar de Melo Barcelos said that seven bodies had been recovered by nightfall, adding that only one-third of the roughly 300 workers at the site of the disaster had been accounted for.
Emergency teams rescued scores of trapped people by helicopter.
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.
