{"id":30652,"date":"2019-01-26T08:23:11","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T08:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30652"},"modified":"2019-01-26T08:23:11","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T08:23:11","slug":"brazil-dam-collapse-200-missing-seven-confirmed-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30652","title":{"rendered":"Brazil dam collapse: 200 missing, seven confirmed dead"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At least seven people have been killed and about 200 others have gone missing in southeast Brazil<\/a>\u00a0 after a tailings dam collapsed at an iron ore mine<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Fabio Schvartsman, the chief executive of the company that owns the mine, Vale SA, said only one-third of the roughly 300 workers at the site during Friday’s disaster had been accounted for.<\/p>\n

“The principal victims were our own workers,” Schvartsman told a news conference on Friday evening, adding that the canteen where many ate “was buried by the mud at lunchtime”.<\/p>\n

Seven bodies had been recovered by nightfall, said Avimar de Melo Barcelos, the mayor of the town of Brumadinho where the dam burst in the mining-heavy state of Minas Gerais.<\/p>\n

The toll was expected to rise sharply.<\/p>\n

President Jair Bolsonaro<\/a> will visit the affected region on Saturday, a government spokesman said. Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, was already on his way.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro “regrets the possible loss of life” and was closely following the situation, the spokesman, Otavio Santana do Rego Barros, told reporters.<\/p>\n

Television images taken from the air showed a wide swath of devastation cut through vegetation and farmland.<\/p>\n

Several damaged homes could be seen, and some were destroyed with nothing but their tiled roofs left sitting on mud.<\/p>\n

An emergency team from the Ibama environmental protection agency had been dispatched to the zone impacted by Friday’s dam collapse to determine the damage, Salles told the G1 news website.<\/p>\n

The agency estimated the collapse had released a million tonnes of water and mud, according to the Estadao newspaper.<\/p>\n

Five helicopters were dispatched to the area to search for people in distress and evaluate the scale of the destruction.<\/p>\n

Civil defence officials said people living in low-lying areas in the town had been evacuated from their homes.<\/p>\n

Brumadinho’s municipality issued an alert on social media warning residents to move away from the Paraopeba river that the dam had been holding back.<\/p>\n

The accident comes three years after Brazil’s worst environmental disaster when a larger dam owned jointly by Vale and BHP Billiton broke in the same region, burying local homes and killing 19 people.<\/p>\n

Friday’s incident appeared to pale in comparison with the 2015 disaster in Mariana in Minas Gerais, when the tailings dam at the Samarco iron ore mine burst.<\/p>\n

Brumadinho is located 60km southwest of Belo Horizonte.<\/p>\n

The town is best known to tourists for Inhotim, an outdoor contemporary art museum, which was evacuated as a precaution. The venue receives 35,000 visitors a month.<\/p>\n

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At least seven people have been killed and about 200 others have gone missing in southeast Brazil\u00a0 after a tailings dam collapsed at an iron ore mine. Fabio Schvartsman, the chief executive of the company that owns the mine, Vale SA, said only one-third of the roughly 300 workers at the site during Friday’s disaster…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":30653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}