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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema