Raging torrents from a ruptured dam swamped a rural Brazilian city on Thursday, forcing residents to scramble onto rooftops and climb high trees to escape the deadly floodwaters.
Four people were killed and at least 120 homes destroyed in a region already devastated by more than a month of floods.
Officials said floodwaters inundated Cocal, a northeastern farming city of about 25,000 in Piaui state, after a dam section gave way under the weight of a reservoir bloated by rains.
The waters swept away homes, trees and electrical energy towers and left behind muddy river beds filled with splinters and large dislodged rocks.
Images showed Brazilians sobbing outside their wrecked houses.
The destruction was among the most dramatic in more than a month of northern Brazilian flooding that has killed nearly 60 and left hundreds of thousands homeless in a wide swath of northern Brazil stretching from the Amazon to normally arid coastal areas.
”It was like a tsunami with total destruction, especially in the areas close to the dam,” Piaui State Governor Wellington Dias told reporters after touring the devastation zone.
Globo TV said the rupture sent 50 billion liters of water pouring out of the reservoir in just one hour, causing flooding that stretched 100km downriver from Cocal.
Eleven people were missing, 80 suffered injuries and about 3,000 were forced from their homes.
Authorities began evacuating families about two hours after the dam failed, but civil defense authorities said on Thursday night that search and rescue missions for the missing were suspended until yesterday. Churches and other buildings were turned into shelters for the 2,953 people who were displaced.
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