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In Brazil, the authorities have made more casualties as a result of a mbadive collapse of a dam that caused a devastating landslide up to 58 people as hopes of finding survivors disappear .
The fear of a second breach in a dam near the town of Brumadinho, in the southeastern part of the country, dissipated on Sunday, allowing the resumption of search for hundreds of people still missing.
Early Sunday, the authorities of State of Minas Gerais had put the search and rescue operations on hold and moved to evacuate many Brumadinho Neighborhoods after Vale have sounded the alarm bells over extremely dangerous water levels at a different dam, called B6, located in the same area.
But in the afternoon, civil engineers gave everything.
"There is no longer a risk of a break," said Lt. Col. Flavio Godinho, spokesman for the state's civil defense agency, adding that high levels 39, water had been drained.
"The search resumed – by land, by plane and with dogs."
Dozens of helicopters had to be deployed because the thick mud was too dangerous for ground rescuers.
"I came to the river to see if I can find any information, anyone who could tell me anything," Fernandos Nune Araujo, Peterson's brother, a vanished subcontractor, told Al Jazeera the mine.
"Maybe they'll find a body and maybe it'll be my brother," he added, his voice broken.
The last official record of the breach of the dam was 58 dead and 305 missing, according to Godinho. He said the rescuers found a bus full of body. So far, 192 people have been saved alive, 23 of whom have been hospitalized with injuries, said one official.
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The broken dam, 42 years old and 86 meters high, was being dismantled. Vale said it has recently pbaded the structural safety tests.
The workers at his mine were having lunch in an administrative area on Friday when they were submerged by millions of tons of muddy trails – a byproduct of garbage mining operations of iron ore.
After overflowing from a second dam, the muddy mbad headed towards Brumadinho, but only looked at the edge of the city before roaring through the vegetation and farmland, destroying homes and swallowing tractors and roads in its path.
Vale was shaken by the disaster, the second in three years to suffer in the same state.
Brazilian judicial authorities announced that they had frozen $ 3 billion worth of Vale's badets, stating that real estate and vehicles would be seized if the company failed to obtain the full amount.
The federal and state governments also imposed fines totaling $ 92.5 million.
The mining company, one of the largest in the world, was involved in the collapse of a mine in 2015 in another part of Minas Gerais, which claimed 19 lives.
At the time, a tailings dam collapsed in an iron mine owned by Samarco Mineracao SA, a Vale joint venture with the BHP group. The resulting toxic stream of mud buried a small village and contaminated an important river in the midst of the worst environmental disaster Brazil has ever seen.
"Can not stay calm"
Even before suspending relief efforts for half a day, the hopes of their loved ones for survival turned into anguish and anger at the growing likelihood that many of the hundreds of missing people would have died.
Caroline Steifeld, who was evacuated, said she heard the sirens alert on Sunday, but no such alert happened when the first dam collapsed two days ago.
"I only heard screams, people who said to go out, I had to run with my family to go higher, but there was no siren," he said. she declared, adding that a cousin was still untraceable.
Several others have made similar complaints during an interview with the Associated Press. An email to Vale requesting a comment was not immediately answered.
"I am angry, I absolutely can not stay calm," said Sonia Fatima da Silva, while she was trying to get information about her son, who had been working in Vale for 20 years. "My hope is that they are honest, I want news, even if it's bad."
Daniel Schweimler of Al Jazeera, of Brumadinho, said tensions in the city were exacerbated.
"Many questions arise as to why we did not learn the lessons from the latest disaster of this type in the neighboring city of Mariana in November 2015," he said.
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| Authorities deployed helicopters because thick mud was too dangerous for land rescuers [Adriano Machado/Reuters] |
The Brazilian branch of environmental group Greenpeace said the dam's rupture was "a sad consequence of the lessons that the Brazilian government and the mining companies have not learned".
Such incidents "are not accidents, but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired," he added.
Marina Silva, a former environment minister who visited the site of the collapse of the dam, called for more preventive actions to end such disasters in the future.
"Federal and state support for victims is very important, and taking action to prevent such situations is just as important as saving the victims," she said.
"We can not become specialists in victim support and the consolation of widows and orphans, we must anticipate such things.There are ways to protect society from this type of crime, such as of calamity. "
Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at Woodrow Wilson Center, said that there was a "collective fault" on the part of Vale and state and local authorities.
"In the light of this tragedy that could cause the victims to count on hundreds of people, I think the country will react and ask for practical and effective responses," he told Al Jazeera from Washington.
"Yes, the number of licensing requirements imposed on Brazil is sometimes excessive, but the challenge is to reform the system and maintain or improve regulations where they are needed – and, as it is generally the problem in Brazil, to enforce the regulations, the laws are pretty good but they are not enforced and we see again a demonstration of this kind of irresponsibility. "
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