The death toll from torrential rains that triggered floods and landslides in northeastern Brazil has risen to 100, officials said on Tuesday, as emergency workers searched for more victims.
The force of the landslides ripped apart houses in neighbourhoods including Jardim Monteverde, a poor community just outside the city of Recife.
Rescue workers have found dozens of bodies buried in the mud that tore through the neighbourhood on Saturday, and said they expect to find more.
At least 14 people remain missing, said disaster management officials for the state of Pernambuco, the scene of the latest in a series of deadly weather disasters to hit the country in recent months.President Jair Bolsonaro posted a video on Twitter that showed him flying in a helicopter over the disaster zone where brown floodwater inundated large areas and gashes of mud scarred hillsides where houses once stood.“I tried to land, but the pilots' recommendation was that, given the instability of the soil, we could have an accident. So we decided against it,” the far-right president told a news conference.
He recalled a string of devastating floods in Brazil that have killed hundreds of people in recent months, and which experts say are being aggravated by climate change.
“In the last 24 hours, 100 deaths have been recorded,while 14 people are missing,” the Civil Defence said in a statement on
Saturday.More than 760 people have been forced to leave their homes because of the flooding in Pernambuco, civil defence officials said on Twitter.
The executive secretary of the civil defence agency in Pernambuco, Lieutenant Colonel Leonardo Rodrigues, said in a video posted on Instagram that about 32,000 families live in areas at risk of landslides or flooding in the state.Schools in the city of Recife have been opened to receive the homeless.
In Alagoas, another state in the region, two people died when they were swept away in river flooding on Friday. The state government said 33 municipalities have declared an emergency due to the effects of the heavyrains in the past several days.
Videos posted on social media show wide flooded avenues in several municipalities, collapsing houses and landslides.
Between Friday night and Saturday morning, the volume of rainfall reached 236 millimetres (nine inches) in some parts of the Pernambuco capital, according to the mayor’s office.
That’s equivalent to more than 70 percent of the forecast for the whole month of May in the city.The Pernambuco Water and Climate Agency said the situation could worsen as rain will continue for the next 24 hours in the state.
