© Leo Drumond/Nitro via APA structure lays in ruins after a dam collapsed near Brumadinho, Brazil, Friday, Jan. 25, 2019. Brazilian mining company Vale SA said it didn’t yet have information on deaths or injuries at the dam but said that tailings have reached the community of Vila Ferteco.
A dam that held back mining waste collapsed Friday in
Brazil, inundating a nearby community in reddish-brown sludge, killing at least seven people and leaving scores of others missing.
Parts of the city of Brumadinho were evacuated, and firefighters rescued people by helicopter and ground vehicles. Local television channel TV Record showed a helicopter hovering inches off the ground as it pulled people covered in mud out of the waste.
Photos showed rooftops poking above an extensive field of the mud, which also cut off roads. The flow of waste reached the nearby community of Vila Ferteco and an administrative office for Brazilian mining company Vale SA, where employees were present.
″'I've never seen anything like it," Josiele Rosa Silva Tomas, president of Brumadinho resident's association, told The Associated Press by phone. "It was horrible ... the amount of mud that took over."
Seven bodies had been recovered by late Friday, according to a statement from the governor's office of Minas Gerais state.
Vale CEO Fabio Schvartsman said he did not know what caused the collapse. About 300 employees were working when it happened. About 100 had been accounted for, and rescue efforts were under way to determine what had happened to the others.
"The principal victims were our own workers," Schvartsman told a news conference Friday evening. He said a restaurant was buried by the mud at lunchtime.
Comment: See also: Sinkhole appears in the center of Amsterdam