Landslides caused by heavy rains have left at least 10 dead, and one person is missing in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (southeast), according to the latest report from firefighters on Sunday.
Nine people died in Ipatinga, a town of 227,000 inhabitants where 80 mm of precipitation fell in one hour during the night from Saturday to Sunday, according to the town hall.
Among the victims, an 8-year-old child whose body was found by firefighters in the rubble of a house destroyed after a landslide.
Another mudslide devastated everything in its path along a hillside street in the Betânia district. In AFP aerial photos, residential debris emerges from a huge brown spot.
One person remains missing in this neighborhood, while the bodies of four members of his family were pulled out of the mud.
A body was also found in the nearby town of Santana do Paraiso.
“The problem is not just the rain last night. It has rained almost every day for a month, which is why the earth is soggy,” explained the mayor, Gustavo Nunes, during a press conference.
“We had a large number of landslides, which caused the collapse of several houses,” he summarized, warning that further rainfall was expected in the evening.
The mayor also revealed that patients from a dispensary damaged by a mudslide had to be transferred to hospitals.
Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema announced he would travel to Ipatinga on Monday.
He sent on social networks a message of “solidarity with the victims of the landslides last night”, making available to the municipality “all the means of the State to come to the aid of those affected by the heavy rains” .
Brazil was strongly affected by extreme weather events last year, including terrible floods which killed more than 180 people in April and May in the south of the country, also causing gigantic material damage.
Latin America’s largest country was also hit last year by a historic drought linked to global warming, according to experts and the government.
This drought has favored the spread of devastating fires, particularly in the Amazon, with more than 140,000 fire outbreaks recorded last year, unheard of in 17 years.
Photo AFP
