The south of Brazil is a “war zone”, with entire towns flooded and thousands of people isolated after torrential rains which caused the death of 75 people this week, authorities warned on Sunday.
From the waterlogged streets or from the sky, the scale of the disaster in the state of Rio Grande do Sul is staggering: houses whose roofs can barely be seen, residents who lost everything in a few minutes and the center of Porto Alegre, a very modern regional capital where 1.4 million people live, was completely flooded.
More than 3,000 soldiers, firefighters and rescuers are mobilized to rescue residents in complete disarray. But also for the search for the hundred missing people, according to the latest report from Civil Defense.
“Our state is a war zone and we will have to put in place treatment also for the post-war period,” warned Governor Eduardo Leite during a press conference alongside President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several ministers.
The Head of State visited this agricultural state of around 11 million inhabitants, one of the most dynamic and richest in Brazil, on Sunday for the second time in a few days.
Facing the governor, who had called the day before for a “Marshall Plan”, Lula promised that the federal government would “accelerate the provision of all the necessary means” for reconstruction.
Solidarity
Calls for donations for the 334 affected communities are increasing, as are gestures of solidarity.
In Porto Alegre, Eduardo Bittencourt, a 36-year-old trader, organized himself with a group of volunteers to pick up residents trapped by the waters.
“Things are very complicated, we help the people we can help, but it’s the law of nature,” he told AFP.
The army is urgently working to set up field hospitals, as hundreds of patients have had to be evacuated from health centers. From schools to prisons, all infrastructure is affected.
Access to water is stopped in 70% of Porto Alegre and its metropolitan region, where localities like Canoas, Guaiba and Eldorado are completely flooded.
And the water continues to advance in and around Porto Alegre. According to the municipality, the Guaiba River which crosses the city has reached a record level of 5.30 meters, well beyond the historic peak of 4.76 m recorded during the floods of 1941.
Rosana Custodio, a 37-year-old nurse who had to flee her home in Porto Alegre, “lost everything”. “Thursday around midnight, the waters started to rise very quickly,” she told AFP via WhatsApp. “My husband put our two little ones in a kayak and paddled with a bamboo pole. My son and I swam to the end of the street.”
They took refuge in his brother-in-law’s house, in Esteio, north of Porto Alegre, but the waters rose again on Friday and the tragedy repeated itself. “We were saved by a friend’s motorboat,” she said. Since then, she and her family have been sheltered but “we lost everything we had.”
Like her, nearly 17,000 people were welcomed into shelters set up by the public authorities. And some 90,000 other people had to leave their homes. More than a million homes are without water.
From the Vatican, Pope Francis said on Sunday “pray for the inhabitants” of the State. “The Lord carries the deceased in his heart, he comforts their families and those who have had to leave their homes,” declared the sovereign pontiff.
Extreme climatic phenomena
Everywhere, the same scenes are repeated: residents taking refuge on their roofs waiting for help and small boats navigating what were streets and avenues.
A small clearing in the disaster, the precipitation weakened significantly on Sunday, but the authorities are now warning against landslides.
Porto Alegre is more isolated than ever. The main bus station is flooded and closed and the international airport has suspended all operations.
The extreme climatic events represented by these very intense rains were favored by “a disastrous cocktail” which mixes the El Niño meteorological phenomenon with global warming, Brazilian climatologist Francisco Eliseu Aquino explained to AFP.
Rio Grande do Sul has already been hit several times by deadly bad weather, notably in September, when 31 people died after the passage of a devastating cyclone.
