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| Situation Update No. 13 Ref.no.: CE-20100406-25596-BRA
Situation Update No. 13
On 2010-04-09 at 03:04:14 [UTC]
Event: Complex Emergency
Location: Brazil State of Rio de Janeiro Statewide Rio de Janeiro, Niteroi, Sao Goncalo
Number of Deads: 173 person(s)
Number of Injured: 106 person(s)
Number of Missing: 253 person(s)
Number of Evacuated: 11000 person(s)
Situation: Rescue workers dug out bodies and scoured for survivors on Thursday after a torrent of mud dislodged by heavy rain ravaged a hillside slum near Rio de Janeiro, burying dozens of residents. The heaviest rains in more than 40 years, which started on Monday, have triggered close to 200 mudslides which pulverized shacks in hillside communities, killing 173 people and leaving thousands of people homeless in Brazil's second-biggest city. Search teams pulled out 10 bodies and rescued dozens of people from the wreckage of houses swept away by a large slide late on Wednesday that buried about 50 houses in the Bumba Hill slum in the city of Niteroi, across a bay from Rio. Marlene Pineiro said she heard a loud noise as the earth began moving under her house and managed to jump out of a window before it collapsed completely. "We ran and everything starting coming down ... the kitchen, my brothers' room, the living room," she said. "But in the other room it stopped, so when that happened we opened the window ... we jumped into the woods and ran away." The mudslide wiped out all traces of the houses, churches and stores in its path, leaving rubble and a swath of black earth amid the surrounding tropical forest. Soil was piled as high as a two-story building at the bottom of the hillside. The slum had previously been a garbage dump, making the neighborhood more vulnerable to collapse. Rescuers said the chances of finding more survivors was slim because of the lack of air pockets in the mud. "This has been total chaos for the last three days. I've never seen anything like this," said helicopter pilot Marcos Goncalves Maia. Several local media outlets said 200 people were buried beneath the mudslide, some citing Rio's civil defense agency. The deputy governor of Rio state, Luiz Fernando Pezao, said about 200 people lived in Bumba Hill but there was no way to know how many were there when the landslide occurred. "I don't know what to do, I want to help but I don't even know where to start. My cousins are buried in there, the agony is enormous," said Gisele Pimenta, 30, a Bumba Hill resident, in an interview with Brazilian news network Globo. |  | | | |
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