AFP, published on Friday, February 18, 2022 at 03:21
Authorities in the Brazilian city of Petropolis sounded the alarm sirens on Thursday to evacuate several at-risk areas before the arrival of new heavy rains, two days after torrential rains that caused terrible floods and landslides causing at least 117 dead.
The inhabitants of several neighborhoods of this city of 300,000 inhabitants, located in a mountainous region 60 km north of Rio de Janeiro, were called in the late afternoon by alarms and text messages to take shelter at relatives or in shelters “due to the volume of rain which falls on the city and will continue, with a moderate to strong intensity, in the next hours”, indicated the local Civil Defense.
At least two streets were closed and their inhabitants evacuated after a slide of “boulders”, which caused no injuries, added the relief.
This new precipitation comes 48 hours after torrential rains which transformed the picturesque streets of this very touristy city into rivers of mud, destroying houses and carrying dozens of cars and buses with their passengers.
– Tiny hope –
While the burials of victims followed one another at the municipal cemetery, rescuers and volunteers continued Thursday to search the mud and the rubble in search of missing people, with an increasingly tenuous hope of finding them alive.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to be hard to find survivors. Given the situation, it’s even practically impossible, but we have to do our best to be able to return the bodies to the families”, confides to AFP Luciano Gonçalves, a volunteer from 26 years old covered in mud.
“You have to take a lot of precautions because there are still areas at risk”, threatened by landslides, he adds.
According to the authorities, some 500 firefighters, helped by hundreds of volunteers, are mobilized to search the rubble.
The number of missing remains undetermined, with only 41 bodies, according to TV Globo, having been identified so far. The local police reported 116 missing, against 35 listed by the public prosecutor.
Sansao de Santo Domingo, a corporal of the Military Police present to lend a hand to the rescuers, managed Thursday to save a small gray dog in the middle of the rubble of a house at the top of the hill.
“He was scared, he even tried to bite me when I arrived. He was defending his territory, because he knew that his masters had certainly been buried just below, in the mud”, explains this policeman.
– “Worst rain since 1932” –
Thursday, around 850 people had already been collected in improvised shelters, mostly public schools.
President Jair Bolsonaro, on an official visit to Russia earlier this week, then to Hungary on Thursday, was to go to Petropolis on Friday, upon his return to Brazil, to fly over the disaster areas.
The city received in a few hours Tuesday evening more rain than the average for an entire month of February, according to the meteorological agency MetSul.
The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, estimated Wednesday during a press conference on the spot that it was about “the worst rains in volume since 1932”.
Brazil has been hit in this rainy season by particularly deadly rainfall – in the states of Bahia (northeast), Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo (southeast) – which experts have linked to global warming.
With global warming, the risk of heavy rainfall events increases, according to scientists.
These rains, associated in particular in Brazil with an often wild urbanization, favor floods and deadly landslides.
With its opulent old houses, the former summer residence of the Imperial Court is a destination that attracts a large number of visitors in search of history, hiking in mountainous and verdant nature and a temperate climate.
By January 2011, more than 900 people had died due to floods and landslides in a vast region including Petropolis and the neighboring towns of Nova Friburgo, Itaipava and Teresopolis.
The number of deaths due to torrential rains on Tuesday has already exceeded the toll of 2011 for Petropolis, when 73 people died.