The airport is shut down. Dozens of highways have been blocked. Most in the state capital are without running water. The death toll is already at 83 — and sure to climb higher.
“This is the worst disaster ever registered in the state of Rio Grande do Sul,” Gov. Eduardo Leite said. “Perhaps one of the worst disasters that the country has registered in recent history.”
In recent years, Brazil has grappled regularly with natural disasters: record rains, devastating floods, intense droughts and deadly landslides. Political leaders and scientists here have routinely blamed climate change and called for greater action.
That rhetoric has yielded little in the way of concrete change.
GET CAUGHT UP
But this time, given the scope of the damage, the need has appeared far more urgent.
Flying over the devastation Sunday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared openly moved, according to senior aides who accompanied him.
His mood was “a mixture of agony and anger,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his reactions candidly. “He kept saying, ‘Oh, my God. Look at this.’”
After Lula landed, he told aides his public comments needed to reflect the magnitude of the disaster. He told senior congressional and judicial officials that the country needed to change its approach to climate-driven disasters. He called for a national plan to prevent “climatic accidents” and directed top environmental lieutenant Marina Silva to begin forming a strategy.
“We have to stop just running after disaster,” Lula said. “We have to start preparing for what can happen from disasters.”
In a comment provided exclusively to The Washington Post, Lula blamed the devastation in Rio Grande do Sul on the failures of the global community to respond to climate change. He said there was a “historic debt.” Poorer countries that have historically emitted few greenhouse gases, he said, are suffering from the pollution of wealthier nations.
“This was the third record flood in the same region of the country in less than a year,” Lula told The Post. “We and the world need to prepare every day with more plans and resources to deal with extreme climate occurrences.”
In the past 10 days, Rio Grande do Sul has been soaked by three months’ worth of rain. The Guaíba River, which hugs the Porto Alegre coast, swelled to a record height of 5 meters. Fed by a network of engorged tributaries, it gushed its muddy waters into the city to submerge much of the city’s cosmopolitan downtown.
These conditions are unlikely to abate for several weeks, authorities say, and could worsen. Scientists predict that the Guaíba won’t drop below 3 meters — the river’s flood limit — before the end of May. Temperatures, meanwhile, are expected to fall to 50 degrees in the coming days, increasing the risk of hypothermia, as rains refuse to relent and cities teeter on the precipice of anarchy.
People throughout the flood zone have been stranded atop roofs, in scenes resembling Houston after Hurricane Harvey or New Orleans after Katrina. Hospitals have no power. Widespread looting has broken out. A gas station in north Porto Alegre exploded. Inmates in prisons that suffered flooding have been released.
Outside the prisons, there are few means of escape. Roads are shut down; the airport is to remain closed at least through the end of the month.
On Friday and Saturday, a woman in a Porto Alegre suburb documented on social media her fears for herself and her parents as the waters rose. “I’m with two elderly people who can’t climb up onto the roof,” she wrote, according to a story in O Globo. “We’re going to die drowned. Send help, by the love of God.”
The family was saved the next day. The woman’s mother showed signs of hypothermia.
Panic and uncertainty are ripping through the state, as thousands live without power, access to the internet or drinkable water.
The mayor of the suburb Canoas announced that nine patients in a critical care unit had died after the hospital lost power — only to correct himself: Two people died, not nine.
“It’s chaos here,” journalist Kelly Matos said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Matos went to a market recently and didn’t find a single bottle of water. Some people are trying to bathe with sparkling water.
“This is war; that is the word,” she said. “It’s hopelessness, civil unrest. … The tsunami is here.”
