Devastation on the north coast of São Paulo: unstable terrain makes searches difficult

More than 600 men from the Military Police, Army, Civil Defense and city halls are still searching for survivors of the landslides that caused devastation on the north coast of São Paulo in the last three days. A total of 40 deaths were confirmed, 39 of them in the city of São Sebastião. There are dozens of houses buried under the mud and trees that have descended from the slopes. About 40 people are missing.

The coordinator of the Civil Defense of São Paulo, Colonel Hengeel Ricardo Pereira, said that the unstable weather made the searches difficult. ” Our difficulty is with the weather. We expect a lot that the rain will give a truce. That is the concern. The search teams continue to work at the foot of the hills, if there are new landslides, in addition to compromising the searches, there is a risk for those who is working on the site. Another difficulty is the very volume of earth that came down, which was very high. It is time-consuming, manual work, as the firefighters have to dig until they find the people”, said Pereira in a telephone interview with the newspaper O Globo.

In a few hours it rained in the region above 600 mm, more than double the forecast for the entire month. It was the highest record of rainfall in such a short period of time in the country’s history, according to the National Center for Disaster Monitoring Forecast (Cemaden). In Bertioga the accumulated between Saturday and Sunday was 682 mm, while São Sebastião recorded 626 mm. The previous record had occurred last year, in Petrópolis, with 530 mm of rain in 24 hours, which left 241 dead. Inmet meteorologists assessed that there was a combination of factors: the hot and humid air coming from the Amazon found a low pressure system in the Atlantic Ocean, and, thus, the front “parked” over the region of São Sebastião.

Many locations can only be accessed by helicopter

With the slopes saturated with water, the green landscape of the mountains ended up being torn in countless places by the mud of the land that slid, dragging trees, houses and cars. The tragedy made President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva interrupt the Carnival break, in southern Bahia, to visit the region affected by the landslides by helicopter. In a meeting with the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, and with the mayor of São Sebastião, Felipe Augusto, Lula highlighted the joint effort to react to the calamity, which, according to him, was something that had not been seen for some time, in a indirect to the predecessor.

“This partnership that we are establishing here is a good picture for our country. I don’t know which party the mayor is from, I know which party Tarcísio is from, you know which party I ran for in the elections. But look how beautiful and simple it is: we are together. The election is over. He [Tarcísio de Freitas] has an obligation to take care of the state of São Paulo, this one [Felipe Augusto] has the responsibility to govern the city and I have the responsibility to govern the country. If everyone is working alone, our income capacity is much smaller. And that is why we need to be together, to share the good and bad things, because together we will be much stronger and São Sebastião will recover much faster”, said the president.

Government wants reconstruction away from the slopes

Lula announced that he will allocate resources for rebuilding the destroyed houses, but provided that this happens in safe areas, away from the slopes. The Minister of Planning, Simone Tebet, who was in Guarujá during the rains, assured that there is immediate money for federal government relief actions. “We have R$ 400 million to serve Brazil, going forward we will have to replace it to serve other municipalities and states. But we already have money”, said Tebet. The minister also informed that FGTS withdrawals will be released for homeless families.

The governor of São Paulo said that teams were still struggling to assess the size of the damage. “It is such a large volume of land that has been displaced and in such a large area that we even raise the hypothesis that the highway was dragged along, that the highway no longer exists”, he said. He asked tourists not to risk trying to return home, due to the risk of new landslides and several stretches still closed. The São Paulo government office was transferred to São Sebastião. In addition to the municipality, the cities of Ubatuba, Ilhabela, Caraguatatuba and Bertioga are under decree of public calamity.

See where to direct donations

Efforts to find survivors and rescue people stranded by the mud mobilized more than a dozen helicopters. The government of São Paulo asks that donations for the homeless be delivered to the deposits of the Social Fund of São Paulo and the Civil Defense. The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, said via social media that he ordered the Federal Revenue to identify seized goods that could be useful for the affected families: “There are more than R$ 11 million in clothes, shoes, bedding, table, bath items , personal hygiene, cleaning material and kitchen utensils”, said Haddad.

See table with guidelines from the Military Police on how to forward donations.