The death toll from torrential rains that wreaked havoc on much of Petropolis, a tourist magnet in southeastern Brazil, has risen to more than 200, authorities said Wednesday as firefighters continued their search to find dozens more.
According to the latest report released by the police yesterday, 204 people, “124 men and 80 women”, lost their lives in the floods and landslides, while 51 people are still missing.
Their numbers have dwindled in recent days as more bodies or families have been identified and their bodies found.
More than 800 people who were forced to flee their homes because they were in high-risk areas are still being housed in makeshift shelters, mostly schools.
On February 15, within a few hours, in the city, about 60 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro, it rained with the volume that was the largest recorded since 1932, according to authorities.
Landslides destroyed dozens of houses built on hillside, while torrents uprooted trees, overturned and swept away cars, and turned roads into rivers.
Most of the victims in the city of about 300,000 residents lived in high-risk areas, in buildings that had been erected without permission.
The area occupied by arbitrary buildings in Petropolis more than doubled from 1985 to 2020, according to data from the Mapbiomas scientific platform and the IBGE institute published yesterday Wednesday by the G1 news website. The increase reached 108% despite several similar tragedies during this period, such as in 1988, when 171 people lost their lives due to landslides.
In 2011, rains caused landslides and floods with more than 900 dead in a vast mountainous area that includes St. Petersburg and the neighboring cities of Nova Friborg, Itaipava and Teresopolis.
According to the Brazilian Center for Disaster Monitoring (CEMADEN), about 9.5 million people live in so-called high-risk areas, which are particularly vulnerable to floods or landslides. Most of them live in favelas, slums where buildings have been built in precarious conditions, usually without connections to the water and sewerage network.
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