(Canoas) Lula recognized Monday that Brazil was “not prepared” for the historic floods hitting the south of the country, a tragedy which has left at least 147 dead and is continuing due to intense rains and new floods.
A sign that the time remains for crisis management, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva postponed sine die a state visit to Chile planned for this week, the executive citing the “need to monitor the situation” and “coordinate assistance” to disaster victims.
He announced that he would travel to the state of Rio Grande do Sul on Wednesday, for the third time since the start of these unprecedented bad weather two weeks ago.
“This is a catastrophe of a magnitude for which we were not prepared,” the head of state said during a meeting with Finance Minister Fernando Haddad and other officials, attended remotely by the state governor, Eduardo Leite.
According to the latest update published Monday by Civil Defense, 147 people were killed, 806 were injured and 127 are missing. More than 600,000 had to abandon their homes, including more than 77,000 in schools and other gymnasiums transformed into shelters.
In the Harmonia district of the town of Canoas, a suburb of the regional capital Porto Alegre, residents returned home to measure the extent of the damage and save what could still be saved.
“There was the October flood and now this one. I lost everything,” says Alcedir Alves, a 58-year-old mason.
Record flood expected
This important agricultural region still offers a spectacle of chaos, between flooded streets, submerged fields, ravaged buildings and cut roads.
New intense rains fell throughout the weekend in the region, once again swelling rivers and raising fears of additional damage.
Showers subsided on Monday, but local authorities urged evacuees not to return home, especially in and around Porto Alegre, where the Guaiba River could reach a new record.
The river, which borders several devastated localities, exceeded five meters on Monday for the first time since Thursday and continues to rise due to the rains over the weekend. According to Civil Defense, it could exceed the historic peak of 5.35 meters reached on May 5.
In Argentina too
The torrential rains, which experts link to global warming and the natural weather phenomenon El Niño, have affected more than two million people in total.
Among them are at least 80 indigenous communities, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council of Brazil. The government said Monday it had delivered food kits and drinking water for 240 families in three such communities in the Taquari Valley.
The situation will become even more complicated with the arrival of a cold front which will cause temperatures to drop, warned the meteorological agency MetSul.
In Porto Alegre, a modern metropolis of 1.4 million inhabitants, the authorities must carry out a vast operation to distribute aid (drinking water, medicines, clothing, etc.) from across the country, but also from abroad.
The hardest hit families will receive 2,000 reais (around 360 euros) to start “rebuilding their lives”.
To help reconstruction, Lula proposed suspending for three years the payment of Rio Grande do Sul’s debt to the federal state, a debt that had become an “unbearable tourniquet,” according to the governor. This measure will have to be approved by Parliament.
The floods in Brazil also have an impact beyond its borders.
In neighboring Argentina, some 600 people were evacuated from the northeastern province of Entre Rios due to the flooding of the Uruguay River, authorities said.
In the town of Concordia, Mayor Francisco Azcué indicated that the peak was expected on Tuesday and called on the population to be “calm”. “Obviously we are going to have more people evacuated,” he admitted on local radio.