The floods that hit Quito earlier this week left at least 27 dead and 53 injured.
Floods that hit Ecuador’s capital Quito earlier this week left at least 27 people dead and 53 injured, authorities said on Friday who were still looking for two people missing. “There are 27 dead and 53 injured,” said a local security official, Guido Nuñez, during a press briefing organized on Avenue de La Gasca, located in the northwest of the capital and particularly affected by flooding on Monday.
“According to our latest information, two people are still missing,” he added. A previous toll reported 25 dead, 48 injured and 6 missing. Rescue teams continued the search on Friday in the area of a sports field where a volleyball tournament was being played, totally swept away by a torrent of mud and where most of the victims came from.
Several players and spectators were caught in tens of thousands of cubic meters of mud that descended violently from the slopes of the Pichincha volcano after the rupture of a retention basin.
Monday, torrential rains, the strongest recorded for twenty years, hit the Ecuadorian capital for nearly 17 hours, with a record of 75 liters of water falling per m2, against 2 liters per m2 announced.
The retention basin, with a capacity of 4,500 m3, broke after receiving almost four times the usual flow. Buildings and vehicles were damaged, as well as electricity poles.
Three days of mourning were decreed from Tuesday to Thursday by the authorities of the capital of 2.7 million inhabitants. Heavy rains that have been battering Ecuador since October have already hit 22 of its 24 provinces, killing at least 44 and injuring 77, according to a National Risk Management Service report on Thursday.
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