With fear of the return of the rain and in the midst of new evacuations, rescuers and neighbors resumed the search for 13 missing in the southeast of Brazilwhere there are already 55 dead due to a fierce storm.
With unusual amounts of water, the weather unleashed on Monday in the state of Minas Gerais caused floods, building collapses and landslides that buried dozens of people in the municipalities of Juiz de Fora and Ubá.
More than 5 thousand people had to leave their homes in the region.
On Wednesday night the alarm sounded again: new rainfall flooded streets and caused more landslides. More rain is forecast until the weekend.
“It rained a lot, the ravine fell even more and the civil defense called us to evacuate,” Luiz Otávio Souza, a 35-year-old sales promoter who had to leave his home and whose nephew is missing, told AFP.
“Everyone is in panic, friends and relatives asking how we are, it seems like a horror movie,” added this resident of Burnier Park, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods in Juiz de Fora, between tears, with 12 dead and eight missing.
Houses buried by landslides
In the Tres Moinhos neighborhood, three houses were buried by landslides during the early hours of the morning after their inhabitants were evacuated, AFP confirmed.
Several neighbors who had to leave their homes returned to the neighborhood this Thursday to recover furniture, appliances, mattresses and even pets that they had left behind.
During the hours without rain, they hurriedly carried their belongings down the mud-covered streets.
Juiz de Fora recorded, between Sunday and Tuesday, a total of 229.9 mm of rain. In the month, the accumulated until Tuesday was 579 mm, a volume 240% above the February average, according to the National Institute of Meteorology.
“All these meteorological phenomena have always occurred, but now, with global warming, the atmosphere has more energy” that makes them more extreme, renowned Brazilian meteorologist Carlos Nobre told AFP.
“In this case, it was a rain associated with a cold front system that was passing and the Atlantic Ocean was very hot. With that there was a lot of water evaporation. This causes cumulonimbus clouds to form that cause those enormous downpours,” he added.
Disasters due to inclement weather
This tragedy joins other major disasters due to inclement weather suffered by Brazil in recent years, which scientists also associate in several cases with the effects of global warming.
In 2024, unprecedented floods hit the south of the country and left more than 200 dead and two million inhabitants affected, in one of the worst natural disasters in the history of Brazil.
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