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BRAZIL DAM DISASTER

300 feared dead or missing

AFP, Brumadinho
Rescuers worked overnight into yesterday searching for around 300 people missing after a dam collapse at a mine in southeast Brazil killed at least nine, but the local governor said "odds are minimal'1 that they would be found alive.
Seven bodies were recovered Friday hours after the disaster, which saw a torrent of mud break through the disused dam at the iron-ore mine close to the city of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerias, around 1:00 pm.
By early Saturday the official death toll had risen to nine, with "nearly 300 people missing," the local firefighters said, doubling the number of people presumed missing from the previous toll.
Up to 150 of those missing worked in the company's administrative offices which were closest to the dam break, the firefighters said.
The mine is owned by Vale, a
Brazilian mining giant that was involved in a previous 2015 mine collapse in the same state that claimed 19 lives and is regarded as the country's worst-ever environmental disaster.
Vale shares plummeted on the new accident, losing eight percent in New York trading.
Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais, told reporters that, while all was being done to find survivors, "from now, the odds are minimal and it is most likely we will
recover only bodies."
His regional administration said 427 people had been working at the Vale mine at the time of the dam collapse, and 279 were recovered alive. The others were listed as missing.
The massive, muddy flow from the collapse barreled towards the nearby town of Brumadinho, population 39,000, but did not hit it direcdy.
Instead, it carved its way across roads, vegetation and farmland, taking down a bridge, and damaging or destroying homes.
Television images showed people being pulled out of waist-high mud into rescue helicopters, dozens of which were in use by late Friday because of the cut-off land access.
The disaster recalled trauma from the 2015 dam break near Mariana, in Minas Gerais. That accident released millions of tons of toxic iron waste along hundreds of kilometers (miles). Vale was joint operator of that dam, along with the Anglo-Australian group BHP.
The Brazil office of Greenpeace, the environmental activist group, said Friday's dam break was "a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies."
It said the incidents "are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired."