Among the victims, there are 26 children. The search for missing persons continues, five days after landslides that devastated the city.
Le Monde with AFP
Relief have discovered new bodies Saturday, February 19 under the mud cluster in the Brazilian city of Petropolis (South-East) devastated by floods and landslides that have made at least 146 deaths, including 26 children, according to the last assessment of the authorities. Five days after the catastrophe, rescuers, recognizable by their orange dress, continued all day research with excavators and spades to try to find missing.
Diluvian rains fell on Tuesday on the city of 300,000 inhabitants, located 60 km north of Rio de Janeiro, turning streets into mud torrents and causing landslides. Petropolis has received more rain than the average of February. More than 500 firefighters, with helicopters, shovels and sniffy dogs remain mobilized, although the chances of finding survivors are increasingly thin.
In the district of Alto Serra, where nearly 80 houses have been swallowed by a mud casting, rescuers have transported two bodies in the morning in mortuary bags. Elsewhere in the center of the city, members of a family were in tears while the rescuers digged in the ruins of a collapsed house in search of a mother of four children. The father’s bodies and two children have already been found.
as an earthquake
As in emergency operations during earthquakes, rescuers actuate from time to time powerful whistles to call silence and try to detect signs of life. In this area, the authorities argue that the mountain of mud and rubble is unstable. Research is carried out using manual tools and chainsaws in the most difficult locations of access.
“It is impossible to raise heavy gear so far, we have to work like ants,” says Roberto Amaral, coordinator of the Petropolis Fire Supply Panel. Since the launch of research operations, twenty-four people have been found alive mainly in the hours following the disaster.
President Jair Bolsonaro, who flew over the affected areas on Friday, described “war scenes”. The number of missing remains blurry. Police announced on Friday a figure of 218 people, without specifying particularly if it accounted for not yet identified bodies. For the time being, 91 foundings of the 146 found were identified, and 90 victims were buried in the main cemetery of the city, of which 44 in the single day of Saturday, according to the authorities.
Life was slowly resuming in the center of the tourist town, where only supermarkets and pharmacies have reopened, while employees were trying to clean up businesses. A bookseller had to get rid of all his stock of books. “They were stored in the basement. There was water to the ceiling,” said Sandra Correa Neto, 52 years old. “We can not even give them, they are too damaged”.
Summer Summer was particularly murderer in Brazil, with diluvian rains that have made dozens of deaths in recent months in the states of Bahia (Northeast), Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo (southeast). These extreme precipitation are related, according to experts, to climate change.