More than 220 remain missing after an avalanche of liquid mining waste swept through the countryside of Minas Gerais

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Helicopters clattered overhead as teams of men and sniffer dogs picked their way across the few areas of red mud solid enough to walk on. Other recovery teams gathered around a digger as its shovel scooped up the sludge and drained it, again and again.

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Theirs was a grim and increasingly hopeless task: looking for broken bodies in an apocalyptic wasteland of liquid mining waste. And they were facing the realization that many of the victims of Brazil’s most recent environmental disaster may never be found.

There was no time to run when an avalanche of liquid mining waste swept through the Córrego de Feijão open-cast iron ore mine on 25 January, destroying offices, workshops and a canteen where hundreds were eating lunch.

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The wave tore through the lush green countryside of Minas Gerais state, eventually plastering some 252 hectares (623 acres) in sticky red-brown mud.

Since then, 121 bodies have been recovered, but 226 are still missing, and at Brazil’s “Ground Zero”, the question hung in the fetid air: can all those missing bodies ever be found?

“Negative,” said firefighter Fausto Diniz, his neoprene workwear smeared ochre after a recent day crawling on all fours across the mud. “But we will do everything possible to find the most we can.”

The local morgue has asked relatives of some of the missing to provide DNA samples and dental records to help identify the dead. But many relatives are slowly coming to realize that they will not even have a body to mourn.

The destructive power of 11.7m cubic metres of muddy waste meant that rescuers were finding pieces rather than whole corpses. “Today we found an organ you couldn’t identify, an arm and a forearm,” Diniz said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sea of mud below Corrégo de Feijão where rescuers search for bodies. Photograph: Nicolo Lanfranchi/The Guardian

Video of the disaster caught on a CCTV camera shows a tsunami of mud outrunning vehicles and engulfing a goods train. Locals compared it to an earthquake.

Braulio Alcici, 76, sat outside a farmhouse where his son Sergio, 43, used to produce lactose-free cheese on their 100 hectare farm. Now its banana, papaya and mango trees were under up to 25 metres of mud and the fishing lake was a swamp full of mining equipment catapulted down the hillside.

“This was a dream, everything was green, water all around,” Alcici said. “It became a cemetery.”

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The area has a sweet, acrid smell. “That smell wasn’t here before,” said Sergio Alcici.

Volunteer rescue worker Denis Valerio, who also worked on the Mariana disaster, said it was “a mixture of minerals, chemicals used in processing, and the biological matter – fish, animals, human bodies”.

A group of volunteer psychologists is working with not-for-profit group NaAção (In Action) to provide help and support; they said the lack of bodies made it harder for friends and relatives to accept the deaths of loved ones.

“It’s a feeling of having abandoned the person,” said Rosana Bohrer, a psychologist from Brasília and specialist in emergencies and disasters. “When you follow a [funeral] ritual, you make the death concrete. You have closure.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Onlooker looks inside a car left by mud. Photograph: Nicolo Lanfranchi/The Guardian

The disaster came three years after another tailings dam collapsed at a mine near Mariana in the same state, killing 19 people and causing what at the time was Brazil’s worst ever environmental disaster. That mine was operated by Samarco – a joint venture between Anglo-Australian giant BHP Billiton and the Brazilian firm Vale – which also operated the dam at Brumadinho.

No individual has been made responsible for the Mariana disaster, and while billions have been spent on clean-up, Samarco has only paid a fraction of all the fines levied.

Vale has hired a consulting outfit to help investigate the causes of the tragedy and said it is providing “all the necessary resources (food, water, medicines, clothing, transportation, etc)”.

The company has had $2.4bn blocked and been handed £72m in fines. Last week, three Vale employees and two engineers from German company TÜV SÜD were arrested by prosecutors investigating the catastrophe.

But the arrests were of little comfort to Enio do Amaral, 56, whose sister Gislene, 51, worked for Vale and is still missing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Denis Valerio, volunteer rescue worker, looks at the disaster zone near Corrégo de Feijão. Photograph: Nicolo Lanfranchi/The Guardian

On a recent morning in Mario Campos, a roadside community near Brumadinho, he held up her photo in her workwear. “She was a sensational person, a hard worker, honest, all the qualities,” he said.

He and his two brothers were preparing to set off for the morgue, which had asked them to bring Gislene’s toothbrush and dental records and provide DNA samples in the hope of identifying some of her remains.

“We are mourning every day and we don’t have a body. It is difficult,” he said. “We want a body to end this.”