The death toll from the floods, which authorities describe as the worst climate disaster to hit southern Brazil, has risen to 90. Heavy rains have inundated large areas of Rio Grande do Sul state, displaced more than 155,000 people and forced the closure of the main airport in the fifth largest city of the country, writes The Guardian newspaper.
Photos taken directly from Porto Alegre airport, one of the busiest in Brazil, illustrate the massive power of the floods. Images are circulating on social media showing its main terminal completely flooded. A cargo plane stands in the vast expanse of water, accompanied only by a pair of flooded boarding steps.
At least 361 people were injured and 131 are missing. More than 48,000 people are living in dozens of temporarily erected shelters.
“The state is facing a war-like situation,” state governor Eduardo Leite said Sunday, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva flew to the region to oversee rescue efforts. “It’s one of those events that will go down in history,” added Leite, who has declared a state of emergency in 397 of his state’s 497 cities.
How fast is current climate change?
We wrote in detail about how quickly it warms up in this article.
One of the worst affected cities is the state capital Porto Alegre, which lies along the Guaíba River. The water level reached a record 5.33 meters on Sunday morning, which is even higher than during the historic floods of 1941, when it rained for more than 20 days straight. The water also flooded four main highways, which greatly isolates the city.
Local journalist Rodrigo Lopes posted a video of himself paddling a canoe through normally busy streets past a flooded shopping center and bank. “The silence is overwhelming in an area that is normally full of people. (…) And all we hear is the sound of our ship’s oars,” Lopes said as his vessel moved through the coffee-colored waters. “The heart of Porto Alegre is wounded,” he wrote.
Residents of Eldorado do Sul, 17 kilometers from the state capital Porto Alegre, who were forced from their homes due to flooding, were forced to sleep on the side of the road. Entire families left the flooded city on foot, carrying their belongings in backpacks and shopping carts.
“We have been without food for three days and we have only just received this blanket. I’m with people I don’t even know, I don’t know where my family is,” a young man told reporters from Reuters.
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The floods have made rescue work difficult, dozens of people are still waiting to be evacuated by boat or helicopter from the affected houses. Small boats crisscrossed the flooded town looking for survivors.
In addition to destroying critical infrastructure, heavy rains and flooding left grain fields under water and killed livestock, disrupted the soybean harvest and halted work at several meatpacking plants. The port of Rio Grande, the main grain export port, was operating normally, but the main access roads are impassable, disrupting grain deliveries.
Climate experts attribute the extreme rainfall in Rio Grande do Sul to the combination of a heat wave caused by this year’s El Niño phenomenon, which warms the waters of the Pacific and brings rain to southern Brazil, a weaker cold front with rain and gales coming from Antarctica, and unusual warmth in the Atlantic, which also increases humidity. Global warming and the climate crisis are exacerbating these phenomena and intensifying the interaction of these systems, making the weather more unpredictable, said Marcelo Schneider, a researcher at the National Meteorological Institute.
What is El Niño?
- The most prominent manifestation of the phenomenon El Nino is a warming of the water in the eastern part of the tropical Pacific by several degrees. La Niña it is then the opposite phase and cools the same area.
- The main driving force behind both phases are changes in the winds blowing from east to west, called the trade winds. If they are weaker than normal, it is El Niño, if stronger, it occurs La Niña.
- The designation of phenomena comes from Spanish. El Niño means a boy and La Niña means a girl. It is supposed to come from Peru, where fishermen noticed the phenomenon hundreds of years ago.
- Radan Huth from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic describes El Niño and La Niña as two sides of one phenomenon. That is called El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO). You can also meet with the designation purely southern oscillation, which according to Huth refers more to an atmospheric phenomenon, while El Niño refers to an oceanic phenomenon. However, both levels are very interconnected and therefore not always distinguishable.
Photo: List of News
During the El Niño phenomenon, weak trade winds drop warm water all the way to South America.
