Rescuers discovered new bodies on Saturday February 19 under piles of mud in the Brazilian city of Petropolis (southeast) devastated by floods and landslides which killed at least 146 people, including 26 children, according to the latest report. authorities. Five days after the disaster, the rescuers, recognizable by their orange outfits, continued the search all day long using shovels and spades to try to find the missing.
Heavy rains battered the city of 300,000 people, located 60 km north of Rio de Janeiro, on Tuesday, turning the streets into torrents of mud and causing landslides. Petropolis received more rain than the average for an entire month of February. More than 500 firefighters, with helicopters, diggers and sniffer dogs remain mobilized, even if the chances of finding survivors are increasingly slim.
In the Alto Serra district, where nearly 80 houses were engulfed by a mudslide, rescuers transported two bodies in body bags in the morning. Elsewhere in the center of town, members of a family were in tears as rescuers dug through the ruins of a collapsed house in search of a mother of four. The bodies of the father and two children have already been found.
like an earthquake
As in relief operations during earthquakes, rescuers occasionally blow loud whistles to call for silence and try to detect signs of life. In this area, authorities say the mountain of mud and rubble is unstable. Searches are therefore carried out using hand tools and chainsaws in the most difficult to reach places.
“It is impossible to bring heavy machinery up here, we have to work like ants”, explains Roberto Amaral, coordinator of the Petropolis fire brigade special rescue group. Since the launch of the search operations, twenty-four people have been found alive, mainly in the hours following the disaster.
President Jair Bolsonaro, who flew over the disaster areas on Friday, described “scenes of war”. The number of missing remains unclear. The police announced Friday a figure of 218 people, without specifying in particular whether they counted in this total the bodies not yet identified. For the time being, 91 bodies of the 146 found have been identified, and 90 victims have been buried in the main cemetery of the city, including 44 on Saturday alone, according to the authorities.
Life was slowly resuming in the center of the tourist town, where only supermarkets and pharmacies have reopened, while employees tried to clean up businesses. A bookseller had to get rid of all her stock of books. “They were stored in the basement. There was water up to the ceiling”said Sandra Correa Neto, 52. “We can’t even give them away, they are too damaged”.
The austral summer was particularly deadly in Brazil, with torrential rains which have killed dozens of people in recent months in the states of Bahia (northeast), Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo (southeast). These extreme precipitation events are linked, according to experts, to climate change.