Hopes fade for dozens buried in Brazil mudslides
NITEROI, Brazil (AFP) – Rescuers Friday resumed a grim search through a wall of mud with hopes fading of finding survivors as more than 380 people are now feared to have died in Brazil's worst rains in decades.
Overnight rescue teams pulled 17 bodies from the mud after part of a hillside collapsed Wednesday, sliding onto a shantytown built on a landfill across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, burying some 200 people.
But the all-night search effort failed to find any survivors in Niteroi's Morro do Bumba shantytown.
Apart from the 200 buried in the mudslide, officials said at least 182 people have been killed across Rio de Janeiro state since Monday when the heaviest rains in half a century unleashed floods and mudslides.
The torrents tore through the metropolitan area's precarious hillside slums, or favelas, with Niteroi hardest hit with at least 107 dead, according to the civil defense authorities.
Some 14,000 people have been forced to flee their homes due to the disaster, officials said.
The federal government released 113 million dollars in aid for municipalities in Rio state affected by the floods and mudslides, the state's governor Sergio Cabral.
"Our main concern right now is to save lives," Niteroi mayor Jorge Silveira told cable channel Globo News, adding the other priority was to "diminish the possibility that these types of events are repeated."
To do that, people had to be moved from high risk areas like Morro do Bumba, he said.
How many people really were swept away there is unknown.
Firefighter chief Colonel Pedro Machado told AFP Thursday that "based on the testimony of witnesses, some 200 people were buried under the rubble."
In the night, the rescue teams cleared the mountain of mud under the blaze of half a dozen floodlights amid a heavy rain that made the already perilous work more difficult.
Despite the risk of new mudslides, some 150 people worked through the night, with the help of eight excavators, as a stream of trucks came and went loaded with debris.
Twenty-five people, including eight small children, were pulled out alive on Thursday after spending hours buried under mud and debris, fueling the hopes of anxious relatives desperate to find their loved ones.
But firefighters said there was little chance of finding new survivors after part of the hillside fell away and swallowed everything in its path, including 50 houses, a day-care center and a pizzeria.
Cabral said on a visit to the slum the situation was an "ecological and human catastrophe."
"It's absolutely incredible," he said, estimating that clearing operations would last two weeks.
An angry mob in the neighborhood near Rio's iconic Christ the Redeemer smashed one of the trains that takes tourists up to the gigantic statue, upset over the death of three locals, the Agencia O Dia reported.
The crowd said the company that owns the tourist trains was responsible for diverting a sewage canal towards the shanty town four years ago that channeled much of the flood water over the past days. The company director rejected the charges.
Back in Niteroi, Sabrina Carvalho de Jesus, 26, a hospital worker, escaped with her life when the earth began to move, but her grandfather, mother and six-year-old son were buried.
"Honestly, I don't hold out hope any more," she said of her missing loved ones. They were under "an awful lot of earth, and being buried for 12 hours -- that's a lot of time," she added.
But civil defense official Marival Gomes said the search would continue: "There is a chance (of finding survivors," she said. "It is not easy but there is hope."
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