Firefighters called for the evacuation to higher ground of some 24,000 people from the Brazilian town hit by deadly mud flow from an earlier mining dam rupture , as a second dam threatened to collapse.
Sirens began before dawn on January 27, triggered by dangerous water levels at a tailings dam still standing in the Vale SA facility near Brumadinho in Minas Gerais State.
The evacuation efforts diverted attention from a search for hundreds of people missing after the January 25 dam burst unleashed a torrent of mud, burying the miner’s facilities and nearby homes, according to the fire department. “Our work is completely focused on the evacuation,” Pedro Aihara, a spokesman for the state fire department said.
The confirmed death toll rose to 37 bodies found by January 27 morning, the fire department reported.
That already makes the disaster more deadly than a 2015 tailings dam collapse at an iron ore mine less than 100 km to the east, belonging to Samarco Mineracao SA, a Vale joint venture with BHP Group.
Google Maps images locates mining giant Vale SA’s facility in Brumadinho Brazil’s Minas Gerais State.
That dam break spilled five times the mining waste into a more remote region, burying a small village and contaminating a major river in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster on record.
“Everything was shaking and I saw huge trees and people disappearing under the mud,” said Emerson dos Santos, 30, sitting on the roof of his family home to protect what is left of their belongings from looters at the mud-hit area a day after the collapse of a dam at an iron-ore mine belonging to Brazil’s mining giant Vale near the town of Brumadinho in the State of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, on January 26, 2019.
