In Southern Brazil, Rescue Efforts Continue as Ongoing Flooding Leaves Hundreds of Thousands Displaced

[Brenda]

By Kiley Price
May 21, 2024

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At the end of April, the floodgates opened in southern Brazil.
For days, heavy rains pummeled the Rio Grande do Sul state, triggering widespread flooding that has killed at least 150 people and displaced more than 600,000. Some areas saw more than 20 inches of precipitation—equivalent to the amount of rain typically seen over several months in this region.

When the rain first cleared, the rooftops of homes in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul, were the only things visible on residential streets that had transformed into canals. The Beira-Rio stadium—which hosted some of the 2014 World Cup—held a brown soup of rainwater, which has since been drained (though soccer games are suspended for the next few weeks). Dilapidated dikes built decades ago to protect the region from flooding failed during the storm, and are now instead doing the opposite job by trapping water inside, CNN reports.

Amid the fallout, crime has spiked. In the past several weeks, authorities have arrested more than 97 people for theft, looting and sexual abuse, according to safety departments in the region. Families without anywhere else to go have been forced into pop-up safety shelters, including a university sports hall that is currently home to about 6,000 people who sleep on mattresses scattered across the floor.

However, misinformation has spread as fast as water has pooled across the south Brazilian state. Government officials say social media posts urged people to ignore emergency warnings when the storm hit, and new campaigns have falsely spread that workers are no longer making rescue attempts.

“When we stop everything to respond to fake news, we’re diverting public resources and energy away from what really matters, which is serving the public,” Brazil’s Attorney General Jorge Messias told the Associated Press.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21052024/todays-climate-brazil-flooding-disaster-rescue/

This is really terrifying and it reminds me of Katrina where predators took advantage of the situation at the Superdome. Porto Alegre (Joyful Harbor) is the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Its population is 4,240,000. This event happened to a city which is not actually on the coast but on a bay much like Tampa Bay (altho Tampa is on the Gulf not the Atlantic). Americans need to understand this is going to happen in the USA SOON, not in 50 years!

[hunter]

1. 'I've seen things no one should go through': the overwhelming scale of loss in Brazil's floods

As the rain poured down during the night of 3 May, a stream of people began to arrive at the Lutheran University of Brazil in Canoas, a city in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul. For a week, heavy rains had been pummelling the landscape, raising river levels and flooding homes, forcing many to seek shelter elsewhere.

Three weeks later, the university harbours thousands of people and is the largest camp for the displaced amid a growing humanitarian crisis in the state of 10 million inhabitants. More than 580,000 people have been displaced, with almost 70,000 of them depending on shelters, according to a state government report. A total of 2.3 million people have been affected by the torrential rain and floods.

--more--

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/24/brazil-floods

Are we preparing for a similar scale of catastrophe here in the U.S.A.? As the earth heats up this may be a preview of things to come, not at some indefinite time in the future, but within a year or two.

How will we deal with a million displaced people, a hundred thousand of them in temporary shelters?