Antonio Guerra stops in front of the Piabanha River in Petropolis to take a picture of the railings of the bridges, torn and twisted by the force of the water. Friday, February 18, three days following the disaster, the scientist went on site to assess the extent of this new tragedy: he measured the height of the traces of sludge on the walls, noted the mass of sediments in the bed rivers and he mainly questioned the inhabitants.
“No one has ever seen a disaster of such magnitude and neither have I, in thirty years of studying here, it is without a doubt the worst”, says this geographer from the Federal University of Rio, specialist in the natural disasters of this mountainous region, located 68 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro.
Tuesday, February 15, it rained, in three hours, 259.8 millimeters of rain, or 259.8 liters per square meter, the largest volume ever recorded in the city since 1932 and the first records of the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET). Precipitation was also above the 185 millimeters expected for the month of February.
The Piabanha, Quitandinha and Palatinado rivers, which meander down the valley where the city was built in 1843, burst their banks, carrying everything in their path, including buses. Entire sections of the mountains, waterlogged, have detached themselves, “becoming an avalanche of rubbish. It brings together everything you can imagine: trees, clay, boulders, roofs, slabs, doors, everything, and it’s very fast,” comments Antonio Guerra. According to the latest report on Saturday February 19, there were twenty-six landslides which caused the death of at least 146 people. More than 190 others are missing.
You have to climb the hills surrounding the city to understand the extent of the damage. In the alleys of the 24-Mai district, in addition to the mud, huge blocks of stone litter the path where water continues to flow, between rains and burst pipes. At the very top, in front of the muddy mass, Antonio Guerra takes out his geologist’s compass to calculate the inclination of the slope: ” 55°! these houses should never have been built here. Brazilian legislation, which is already too permissive for my taste, prohibits constructions above 45°. Above 20°, which represents an already very steep slope, one can build taking care to build containment walls with drainage channels, a real sanitation network and above all densify less in order to be able to reforest. None of that exists in this neighborhood we just walked through “, explains the specialist.
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