Hope fades for missing in Brazil dam breach

BRUMADINHO, Brazil - Firefighters are carefully moving over treacherous mud, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling, in search of survivors or bodies left by a dam collapse that buried mine buildings and surrounding neighborhoods with iron ore waste.

The confirmed death toll rose to 58, with up to 300 people still missing, authorities said.

In an ominous sign, nobody was recovered alive on Sunday, a stark difference from the first two days of the disaster, when helicopters were whisking people from the mud.

The slow speed of search efforts was due to the treacherous sea of reddish-brown mud that surged out when the mine dam breached Friday afternoon. It is 8-meter deep in some places, and to avoid the danger of sinking and drowning searchers had to carefully walk around the edges or slowly crawl out onto the muck.

Even those efforts were suspended about 10 hours on Sunday because of fears that a second mine dam in the southeastern city of Brumadinho was at risk of failing. An estimated 24,000 people were told to get to higher ground, but by afternoon, civil engineers said the second dam was no longer at risk.

Areas of water-soaked mud appeared to be drying out, which could help rescuers get to areas previously unreachable. Still, it was slow going for the search teams, and residents were on edge.

"Get out searching!" a woman yelled at firefighters near a refuge set up in the center of Brumadinho. "They could be out there in the bush."

Brazilian searchers got reinforcements late on Sunday, when more than 100 Israeli soldiers and other personnel arrived with plans to join recovery efforts.

Throughout the weekend, there was mounting anger at the giant Vale mining company, which operates the mine, and questions arose about an apparent lack of an alarm system on Friday.

Caroline Steifeld said she heard warning sirens on Sunday, but there was no alert when the dam collapsed on Friday.

"I only heard shouting, people saying to get out. I had to run with my family to get to higher ground, but there was no siren," she said, adding that a cousin was still unaccounted for.

In an e-mail, Vale said that the area has eight sirens, but "the speed in which the event happened made sounding an alarm impossible" when the dam burst.

People in Brumadinho desperately awaited word on their loved ones. Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais state, said that by now most recovery efforts would entail pulling out bodies.

The flow of waste reached the nearby community of Vila Ferteco and an occupied Vale administrative office. It buried buildings to their rooftops and an extensive field of the mud cut off roads.

Some residents barely escaped with their lives.

"I saw all the mud coming down the hill, snapping the trees as it descended. It was a tremendous noise," said a tearful Simone Pedrosa, from the neighborhood of Parque Cachoeira, 8 kilometers from where the dam collapsed.

Ap - Xinhua - Reuters

(China Daily 01/29/2019 page12)