Brazil Mud SlideSchoolteacher saves 58 children from mining flood
Her toddler's foot was in a cast after taking a fall in the hotel.
"He's getting used to his new home," she said, managing half a smile.
The first Eliene Almeida, head teacher at the municipal school in Bento Rodrigues, knew of the deadly mud flow that destroyed her village was a cry from her husband.
Most villagers were running for higher ground after hearing a dam at the local Samarco
mine had burst, but no one inside the packed school was aware that a 20
meter-(65-foot)- high wall of mud and water was approaching.
Almeida's husband raced to the school and sounded the warning.
"He came in shouting that we had to run," Almeida, 31, told Reuters at a hotel housing the village's survivors.
Frantically, she rounded up the children, aged mainly between 11 and 16. "Within three minutes everyone was out."
The
flood killed at least four people and on Monday -- four days after the
disaster struck -- 25 people were still missing. But Almeida's 58
students all survived.
Wearing red leggings and a
purple T-shirt she cradled her 18-month-year old son as she recalled the
evacuation calmly on Sunday in the playground of the hotel.
Her toddler's foot was in a cast after taking a fall in the hotel. "He's getting used to his new home," she said, managing half a smile.
There
is little left to see of the school that was a pride of the village of
600 people. Only the roofs are visible, the rest submerged in thick
sludge of water and iron ore waste from the dam at Samarco, owned by
mining giants Vale SA and BHP Billiton.
The lack
of a warning siren or an emergency plan for evacuating villages near the
dams is a constant complaint of those hit by the floods and something
prosecutors say they will pursue.
A 2013 report
commissioned by a state prosecutor warned of serious safety problems
with the Samarco dam. It said an emergency plan should be set up for
Bento Rodrigues, with practice drills, as conditions for renewing a
license for the dam. Residents say no such plan was ever formulated.
The
mayor of the nearby town Mariana, Duarte Junior, himself admitted to
hospital on Sunday with a feared heart attack due to a lack of sleep and
stress since the accident, called Almeida a "hero."
"I don't see it like that," she said with a shrug. "Anyone would have done the same."
She said it was lucky the flood hit in the afternoon, when older students, who could move more quickly, were in class.
Another factor was the wide doors at the entrance that allowed people to escape. "It could have been so much worse."
Almeida
hopes to open a new school and says it is important children resume
their lessons. The local government appears supportive but, she says,
things will never be quite the same.
"You can
build a new school, but all the work that went into that school in
Bento, what it meant to the village, that's gone forever."
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