Firemen have pulled a man’s body from the mud amid the rubble of houses swept away in a landslide in southeastern Brazil, where 30 people have died and another 39 are still missing after torrential rain.
A river burst its banks and streets became raging currents of brown water in the state of Minas Gerais after the overnight downpour in a region that has seen record rainfall this month.
State firefighters said on Tuesday that 30 people had died in the cities of Juiz de Fora and Uba, and that more than 200 people had been rescued.
Firefighters and sniffer dogs were working to find the 39 people still missing in the debris.
In a hillside neighbourhood of Juiz de Fora, 12 houses were swept away in a “massive landslide”, Major Demetrius Goulart of the fire brigade told AFP.
“Many people were inside their homes at night when it was raining,” he said.
Juiz de Fora’s mayor, Margarida Salomao, declared a state of emergency.
“Our focus is to guarantee humanitarian assistance, the restoration of basic services, aid to displaced people and support for reconstruction,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on X.
Salomao said her municipality of a little over half a million people was experiencing its wettest February on record, with 584mm of accumulated rainfall.
An estimated 3,000 people had to leave their homes, the mayor’s office reported.
Some neighbourhoods are isolated, with at least 20 landslides, Salomao said, calling the situation “extreme”.
State authorities suspended classes in all municipal schools.
Brazil has suffered various tragedies in recent years due to extreme weather events ranging from floods to drought and intense heatwaves.
In 2024, more than 200 people died and two million were affected by unprecedented flooding in southern Brazil, one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history.
Two years earlier, a deluge in the city of Petropolis, outside Rio de Janeiro, left 241 people dead.
Experts have linked most of these events to the effects of climate change.
Source: Al Jazeera