By Paulo Trevisani and Jeffrey T. Lewis
BRUMADINHO, Brazil -- The dam was the size of a 28-story
building and it gave way with a loud boom followed by a tidal wave
of mining waste that wiped a nearby village away, leaving Brazilian
authorities on Sunday still searching for hundreds of missing
people two days after the collapse.
The rushing wall of mud, enough to fill a football stadium more
than six times, has already claimed 58 lives. If most of about 300
people still unaccounted for are found to be dead, the disaster
would be the second-worst mining tragedy of its kind in the world,
behind only a 1966 dam collapse in Bulgaria that claimed 488
victims.
A neighbor's warning that the dam had burst helped Antonia
Ferreira dos Santos, 59, escape Friday's wall of mud, which swept
away the home where she had lived for 25 years, as well as washing
away bridges, burying roads and flattening other buildings around
the area.
"I opened the gate and ran. When I stopped and looked back at
where I had been just a few minutes ago, all I saw were trees and
posts being knocked over," she said. "I've lost everything,
everything, everything."
The dam, an earthen structure used to store mining waste and mud
from mining, is owned by Vale SA, the world's biggest iron-ore
producer and one of Brazil's most prominent firms.
Vale chief executive Fabio Schvartsman on Friday called the
accident a tragedy, and asked for forgiveness. The company said it
is focusing all its efforts on helping rescuers, including sending
a helicopter, 800 hospital beds and supplies of water for the
residents of Brumadinho. Friday was a holiday in São Paulo and the
stock market was closed, but the company's American depositary
receipts fell 8%.
Vale had already come under criticism for another dam collapse
in 2015 in the town of Mariana that killed 19 people. Experts at
the time said the company had failed to follow basic security
procedures in dam safety. The company said it would revise its
safety standards.
The government of then-President Dilma Rousseff was fiercely
criticized for failing to respond quickly to the disaster in
Mariana, when she waited a week before visiting the site of the
accident and announcing fines. In the first two days after the dam
in Mariana collapsed, much of the rescue work there was carried out
by volunteers.
Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was sworn in on Jan.
1, established a crisis cabinet just hours after the accident in
Brumadinho, ordering troops and rescue workers to the area the same
day and visiting the area the following day.
He also agreed to accept help from the Israeli government, and a
team of about 130 soldiers, bringing 16 tons of equipment, arrived
in Brazil on Sunday evening.
Legal authorities also appear to be reacting more quickly this
time. The state of Minas Gerais has already imposed a fine of 99
million reais ($26 million) on Vale, while the federal
environmental agency has imposed a 250-million-real ($66 million)
penalty. A federal judge in Minas Gerais also ordered that at least
6 billion reais ($1.6 billion) in Vale's bank accounts be frozen,
to guarantee funding for emergency measures and cleanup
efforts.
Brazil's federal police have already opened an investigation
into the causes of the dam failure, and Attorney General Raquel
Dodge said Saturday she wants prosecutors to be tougher on Vale,
and to work faster, than they did for the Mariana case.
Before the collapse of the dam, Brumadinho was known as a
tranquil, rural town of about 37,000 residents and a base for
tourists visiting Inhotim, a nearby open-air art museum.
Inhotim, a bucolic botanical garden exhibiting large, modern
sculptures, scattered among a collection of lush plants and trees,
was evacuated but undamaged. But it is still not known how many
tourists lodged at the inns and hotels dotting the area might have
been victims of the accident.
A Vale employee who witnessed the catastrophe said he would
normally have been in the company's busy lunchroom at the time of
day the dam collapsed, but on Friday he and a colleague
unexpectedly had to do some work nearby.
"It was about a minute after we started up the hill when we
heard a boom. We saw dust rising up from the dam. We said, 'It
burst' and sped up away from it," said the 30-year-old, who asked
not to be identified for fear of losing his job in a town where
life revolves around the iron mine. "When we looked again, we saw
the mud swallowing up the offices, the restaurant and an area where
they park buses."
His first thought was to call his wife, who had given birth to
their first son a few weeks before. Then he called his
brother-in-law, but got no answer. He called again and again.
"He also worked at the mine. He was having lunch. We never heard
from him again."
By Sunday noon, he hadn't heard from any of his many friends
believed to be at the mine when the dam collapsed.
His mother was crying inconsolably during Sunday service in
Brumadinho's main Catholic church, showing a cellphone photo of her
missing son-in-law.
"He was only 40, with a young son. What now?" she said as
churchgoers tried to console her. "Everything I have at home I have
Vale to thank for. But was it worth it?"
--Andrea Castello Branco and Paul Kiernan contributed to this
article.
Write to Paulo Trevisani at paulo.trevisani@wsj.com and Jeffrey
T. Lewis at jeffrey.lewis@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 27, 2019 19:31 ET (00:31 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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