Brazilian firefighters and more than 100 Israeli rescue workers poked sticks into treacherous mud Monday looking for bodies as pressure mounted on the mining company responsible for a dam that burst on Friday and spilled a flood of iron ore waste.
The death toll has risen to 65, with 279 people still missing, said Lt. Col. Flávio Godinho of the civil defense department in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
Teams focused their searches Monday morning in areas where a bus was immersed and where many workers were eating lunch at the mine cafeteria when the dam ruptured.
Minais Gerais Governor Romeu Zema said, "We are here starting to work with troops from Israel, which I'm very thankful for. And I see that with their technology, we will be able to increase the probabilities of finding survivors and also have more agility finding victims."
According to Israel's Ambassador to Brazil Yossi Shelli, the Israeli teams "have equipment that looks for mobile phone signals under the ground. They will see where there are signals and will see if people are buried there."
He said that Israel was the only country to send an aid mission to the region.
In a sign of the risks posed by the deep mud, Col. Alexandre Ferreira, a doctor with the military police of Minas Gerais, advised rescue crews, volunteers and journalists to take antibiotics to prevent cholera, the bacterial infection leptospirosis and other diseases.
The carpet of mining waste also raised fears of widespread environmental contamination and degradation.
According to Vale's website, the waste is composed mostly of sand and is nontoxic. But a U.N. report found that the waste from a similar Brazil disaster in 2015 "contained high levels of toxic heavy metals."
Brazil's top prosecutor, Raquel Dodge, said the company, the world's largest producer of iron ore, should be held strongly responsible and criminally prosecuted. Executives could also be personally held responsible, she said.
