Torrential rains in Rio de Janeiro

landslides and landslides, over 40 deaths

RIO DE JANEIRO – There is also a very young 17-year-old mother with her child of only three days among the victims, so far confirmed, of the torrential rains that are hitting the South of Brazil and that have caused in Rio de Janeiro some twenty deaths. Landslides have put a strain on the hundreds of thousands of houses built precariously on the slopes of the “morros” that make the city landscape famous. A seven-year-old boy and three other people drowned in the current of a canal overflowing at the edge of a favela.

It has been raining almost continuously for six days now in Rio and the region. The floods have invaded entire neighborhoods of the city. Firefighters, police and civil protection work tirelessly to recover isolated people and bring aid to endangered communities. However, the bad weather did not endanger the New Year on the beaches of Rio: over two million people – including 600,000 foreigners – greeted the arrival of 2010 in front of Copacabana’s fireworks and music show.

But on the first day of the year he brought other victims with him. A luxury hotel and some villas in the seaside resort of Angra dos Reis – one of Brazil’s most exclusive destinations – have been swamped by mud following a series of landslides. The balance is over twenty deaths.

Around 4 am, when most of the guests had retired after the New Year, a landslide completely buried the Pousada Sankay, in the marvelous Praia do Bananal, leaving no way out for the victims. Only those who had been late to see the dawn were saved.

Eleven corpses were recovered from the rubble and mud, and three others were fished out at sea. But others may still be under the avalanche of earth and mud. Another landslide struck seven dream villas on Morro da Carioca, all illegal, built in defiance of environmental laws and the most elementary safety regulations, on steep slopes no longer protected and confirmed by tropical vegetation: 7 people lost their lives.

The torrential rains of these days are exposing all the shortcomings and dangers of illegal buildings and wild constructions in the Rio area, whether they are the billionaire villas of Angra dos Reis, famous for the villas of Ronaldo, Ayrton Senne and the plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy, or that they are the precarious houses of bricks and plywood of the favelas climbed on the “morros” of Rio de Janeiro. Even the coastal road between Rio and San Paolo has collapsed in several places, and many tourists have had difficulty getting home by car.

(01 january 2010)