Nearly 70,000 people have been forced from their homes amid deadly flooding, mudslides, and torrential storms in southern Brazil, with the major city of Porto Alegre particularly hard-hit, the country’s civil defense agency said Saturday.
Raging floodwaters have left 57 dead, 74 people injured, and another 67 missing, civil defense said. The death count did not include two people who died in an explosion at a flooded gas station in Porto Alegre, witnessed by an AFP journalist, where rescue crews were attempting to refuel.
Fast-rising water levels in the state of Rio Grande do Sul were straining dams and particularly threatening economically important Porto Alegre, a city of 1.4 million. The Guaiba River, which flows through the city, is at a historic high of 5.04 meters (16.5 feet), well above the 4.76 meters that had stood as a record since devastating 1941 floods.
Authorities were scrambling to evacuate swamped neighborhoods as residents struggled in chaotic conditions to find their way to safety. In addition to the 69,200 residents forced from their homes, civil defense also said more than a million people lacked access to potable water amid the flooding, describing damage as incalculable.
Rio Grande do Sul Governor Eduardo Leite said his state would need a “Marshall Plan” of heavy investment to rebuild after the catastrophe. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva posted a video of a helicopter depositing a soldier atop a house, where he used a brick to pound a hole in the roof and rescue a baby wrapped in a blanket.
The devastating storms were the result of a “disastrous cocktail” of global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon, climatologist Francisco Eliseu Aquino told AFP on Friday. South America’s largest country has recently experienced a string of extreme weather events, including a cyclone in September that claimed at least 31 lives.