Devastating Rains in Rio Grande do Sul Claim Lives and Displace Populations
There are 336 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul in a state of calamity, causing a tragedy that has already resulted in 83 deaths, 105 missing and 175 injured, as of this Monday, 6/5. In ten days, it rained in Rio Grande do Sul about a quarter of what was expected for a year – between April 24 and May 4 there were 420 mm of rain, while the State average is around 1,500 per year.
Almost one million properties were left without water and six dams, in various regions of the State, are in an emergency situation. Most residents of the affected cities, including the capital Porto Alegre, had to leave their homes, taking shelter in public places, family homes and friends’ homes. Rescue teams, with planes and helicopters, flew continuously across various regions of the state rescuing residents isolated by the waters. Drones were used to identify places and families in need of help.
“We need a Marshall Plan* to recover the State”, declared the governor of RS, Eduardo Leite. The situation became so serious that it led to two visits to the State by President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, the second of which was accompanied by a large delegation of ministers and the presidents of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira, of the Court of Accounts of the Union, Bruno Dantas, the vice-president of the STF, Edson Fachin, and representatives of the Armed Forces.
“The need for reconstruction is practically total, because all the main resources that the State and the population can have have been compromised in whole or in large part”, points out Côrtes. Starting with transport infrastructure. In his view, in addition to the difficulty in moving around, evacuating locations and rescuing victims, food and energy security are consequential difficulties. Without means of transporting food and energy, hunger, fuel distribution and the impossibility of recovering the electricity grid also become problems.
For Côrtes, health is another worrying point of attention. “Even cities that did not have their water supply compromised, but that suffered from flooding, may have contamination of their water distribution networks. Unfortunately, this can increase waterborne diseases, such as hepatitis and leptospirosis, for example.” There had not been floods of the magnitude that occurred last week in Rio Grande do Sul since 1941, which at the time recorded peaks of 4.76 meters. Last week’s reached 5.31 meters.
Causes
Although El Niño has sometimes been cited as the cause of the floods, Côrtes has another opinion. For him, there was a combination of three factors: cold fronts, oceanic humidity and a high pressure barrier. “We have a strong high pressure zone in the central region of Brazil that prevents the cold fronts from proceeding northwards,” he pointed out. This zone, according to the professor, “caused moisture from the Atlantic Ocean to deviate: one part entering from the east of Rio Grande do Sul and the other going around the Amazon and down through the interior of the country, arriving from the west”. In practice, the State suffered from a cold front coming from the south and waves of humidity coming from the east and west; To the north, a barrier caused everything to condense there.
The most affected areas of the State, according to the newspaper Valor Econômico , are the valleys of the Taquari, Caí, Pardo, Jacuí, Sinos, Gravataí and Guaíba rivers, this one in Porto Alegre. Rio Grande and Pelotas are also under alert.
President Lula, government ministers and other authorities who traveled to Rio Grande do Sul this weekend committed to the creation of a special legal framework that facilitates the sending and use of federal resources to finance the measures to resolve the problems created by floods. A decree to this effect was sent to Congress, on the afternoon of this Monday, 6/5, by President Lula with the support of the presidents of the Chamber and the Senate.