Rescue teams pressed a grim search on Wednesday for hundreds of people missing in raging floods that swept through towns in northeastern Brazil, killing at least 45 people.
As three days of heavy rains eased, authorities feared a sharp rise in the death toll as rescuers reach communities cut off by the devastating torrents of mud, water and debris in the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.
Churches, schools and hospitals were underwater, or had simply disappeared in the floods that turned streets into angry rivers in a region already wracked by extreme poverty.
PHOTO: AFP
Tons of mud covered what were once the streets of Branquinha and Rio Largo on the banks of the Mundau River in hard-hit Alagoas, burying houses, businesses and houses of worship.
In many towns the destruction was total, with only pieces of furniture, pots and pans, clothing and other personal articles remaining after the buildings were flattened by the floods.
In Rio Largo, 40km from the state capital Maceio, Cisera Duda, 39, showed reporters the few things she was able to salvage: a dog, a bird and a wet mattress.
“I managed to save something, but I wasn’t able to get hardly anything out of the house,” she said.
For Eduardo Almeida, his wife and three young children, the floods wiped out not only their home, but their livelihood, in the small store and restaurant that was completely washed away.
“This was my life, I do not have anything else,” he said, sifting through the sodden remains where his property used to stand.
The water began to rise at 5am Sunday in Branquinha, 80km from the Alagoas state capital, Maceio, said Olivaldo da Silva, 47.
“Anyone who did not leave by 10am died,” he said as he climbed a ladder on Wednesday to try to clean the mud off his roof.
Dramatic television pictures showed survivors scrambling to rooftops to avoid being swept away, clinging desperately to lines of rope as rescuers in helicopters rushed to pluck them from the muddy floodwaters.
In Maceio, a fire spokesman said: “The tragedy is total, the city is paralyzed.”
A tearful survivor in the town of Palmares, Pernambuco told Globonews television: “It destroyed our city. It destroyed everything.”
Civil defense authorities estimated that some 600 people were missing, basing the tally on reports to authorities and the accounts of locals. Alagoas Governor Teotonio Vilela Filho said Tuesday there could be as many as 1,000 people missing.
“But we are worried because bodies are starting to appear on the beaches and the rivers,” he told the government newswire Agencia Brasil.
The most devastated area was along a stretch of the Mundau river that runs through Alagoas where firefighters said entire riverside communities were washed away.
In the town of Paudalho, on the banks of the Capibaribe river in Pernambuco, a hospital with a 300 bed capacity was swept away by floods, local TV reported. Its patients were moved to nearby shelters.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced late on Tuesday that he would be back to overfly the area today, as Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim has done, the official news agency Agencia Brasil reported.
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