Rescue workers raced against the clock yesterday to unearth as many as 200 people feared buried in a mudslide near Rio de Janeiro, as the death toll from massive floods in the region rose to 182.
More than 24 hours after a hillside suddenly collapsed, 16 bodies had been recovered from tonnes of earth that swept away dozens of homes in Morro do Bumba, a slum built on a landfill in this city across the bay from Rio.
Firefighters said there was virtually no chance of finding survivors under so much mud.
Officials said at least 182 people have been killed in the state of Rio de Janeiro since Monday, when the heaviest rains in half a century unleashed floods and mudslides that tore through the metropolitan area’s precarious hillside slums, or favelas.
Niteroi has been the hardest hit with at least 107 dead, compared with 55 in Rio, civil defense authorities said.
Civil defense officials said that at least 161 people had also been injured in the weather chaos of the past four days, and the state of Rio reported that 14,000 people have been forced to move because of the heavy rain.
The federal government opened a fund with US$113 million to aid municipalities in Rio state affected by the floods and mudslides, state Governor Sergio Cabral said.
“Our main concern right now is to save lives,” Niteroi Mayor Jorge Silveira told cable channel Globo News, adding that the other priority was to “diminish the possibility that these types of events are repeated.”
To do that, people had to be moved from high risk areas like Morro do Bumba, he said.
How many people really were swept away in Morro do Bumba is unknown.
Firefighter chief Colonel Pedro Machado said earlier on Thursday that “based on the testimony of witnesses, some 200 people were buried under the rubble.”
Rui Franca, the commander of the 12th military police battalion in Niteroi, however, said: “It is impossible to make a rational estimate of the number of people buried because there is no relief map of the area.”
Despite the risk of new mudslides, about 150 people worked through the night, with the help of eight excavators, as a stream of trucks came and went loaded with debris.
Twenty-five people, including eight small children, were pulled out alive on Thursday after spending hours buried under mud and debris, fueling the hopes of anxious relatives desperate to find their loved ones.
However, firefighters said there was little chance of finding survivors after part of the hillside fell away and swallowed everything in its path, including 50 houses, a day-care center and a pizzeria.
An angry mob in the neighborhood near Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer smashed one of the trains that takes tourists up to the gigantic statue, upset over the death of three locals, the Agencia O Dia reported.
The crowd said the company that owns the tourist trains was responsible for diverting a sewage canal towards the shanty town four years ago that channeled much of the flood water over the past days.
The company director rejected the charges.
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