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.
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital. Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself. The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and
RSS