Torrential rains in the metropolitan area of Recife, in northeastern Brazil, left 79 dead, according to the latest report, while late Sunday night rescuers and volunteers continued the incessant search for the missing.
The epicenter of this new natural disaster in Brazil was in the Jardim Monteverde community, a steep area with precarious houses on the border between Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, and the municipality of Jaboatao dos Guararapes, where a landslide buried entire houses on Saturday. and caused the death of 19 people.
Since Saturday afternoon, Flávio José da Silva had been looking for his stepfather Gilvan in the rubble of what used to be his house. Shortly after the hill collapsed, she managed to talk to him. “He told us ‘I’m here under the ground’. We hope to find him alive,” he told AFP, pointing to the mountain of debris mixed with mud.
In Jardim Monteverde, rescuers removed rubble with the help of volunteers, amid great destruction and the pain of neighbors.
Luiz Estevao Aguiar told TV Globo through tears that eleven of those killed in that landslide were his relatives.
“My sister died, my brother-in-law, 11 people in my family died, it was difficult. It was very difficult. I did not expect this,” said this older man who lives in another municipality.
Behind him, a human chain, with their feet sunk in the mud, was passing buckets of waste coming down from the hill.
Aerial images show some points of the capital of Pernambuco and neighboring municipalities completely flooded or with huge sinkholes.
– Inaccurate number of disappeared –
In the previous balance, 56 were reported missing due to landslides, the collapse of houses or the furious currents of water and mud that devastated everything in its path in Recife and a dozen municipalities, including Olinda, which was decreed in emergency.
But in the last part, the authorities said that the number of people whose whereabouts are unknown “is not closed.”
“We still don’t have that exact number, but there are still reports of victims of the accidents caused by the rains that were not located. The searches will continue until we can identify all the missing people,” Paulo Camara, the governor, told a news conference. from Pernambuco.
The ravages also left almost 4,000 homeless or displaced people and extensive damage to the infrastructure of several municipalities.
The Chamber announced that the state government has released an emergency allocation of 100 million reais (about 20 million dollars) for search tasks and urgent works.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who on Sunday sent a delegation of four ministers to Recife, will visit the affected area on Monday and will announce measures “to support the affected population and municipalities.”
Aerial images show some parts of Recife and neighboring municipalities completely flooded.
– More rain –
Forecasts call for more rain on Monday.
Between Friday night and Saturday morning, the volume of rains reached 70% of what was expected for the entire month of May in some parts of the capital of Pernambuco.
Meteorologist Estael Sias, from the MetSul agency, explained to AFP that the intense rains that affect Pernambuco and, to a lesser extent, four other states in the northeast of the country, are the product of a phenomenon typical of this season, the so-called ” Eastern waves”, areas of “atmospheric disturbance” that move from the African continent to that Brazilian coastal region.
“In other areas of the Atlantic this instability forms hurricanes, but in the northeast of Brazil it has the potential for a lot of rain and even electrical storms,” he explained.
The images of this weekend evoke the drama that occurred in February in Petrópolis, in the state of Rio de Janeiro (southeast), where 233 people died due to torrential rains and landslides.
According to experts, tragedies of this type are due, in addition to heavy rains, to the topography and the existence of large neighborhoods with precarious housing, many of them built illegally, in the steep risk areas.
