Rio de Janeiro: At least 200 people were buried under tons of mud and feared dead on Thursday after a slum built atop a former landfill gave way in the latest deadly landslide to hit metro Rio de Janeiro.
If confirmed, the deaths would raise the toll sharply from the 153 people already known to have died this week in slides triggered by record rains.
Pedro Machado, subsecretary of Rio state's Civil Defence department, told Globo TV that as many as 60 houses and at least 200 people were buried in the Morro Bumba slum in Niteroi, a city of about 500,000 just across the bay from Rio.
"In our experience, it's an instant death" for anyone caught in such a slide, Machado said.
The shantytown was built on a former garbage dump where trash had accumulated for decades - making the ground there especially unstable and vulnerable to the heavy rains, said Agostinho Guerreiro, president of Rio's main association of engineers and architects.
"It is very fragile soil. It couldn't hold (the rain). The houses came down, destroying the ones below them," Guerreiro told Globo. "It was a tragedy foretold."
The federal government announced an emergency fund of 200 million reals ($114 million) to help the state deal with the mudslides and flooding.
A fire department spokesman said six bodies had been found so far in the Morro Bumba and 28 people were rescued after the mudslide hit late Wednesday.
Alves Souza, commander of the firefighters in the Niteroi rescue operations, said the wet, steep terrain posed a continued threat to anyone trapped in the wreckage and emergency crews as well.
"The work is very intense, given the fact that the volume of material we have here is very large," Souza said.
Record rainfall since Monday has triggered deadly mudslides across Rio's metropolitan area.
Firefighters said the official death toll stands at 153, but that does not include those buried in Morro Bumba.
Nearly all the deaths occurred in mudslides that smashed through slums - yet another reminder that life in one of the world's most famous playgrounds is much different for the poor than it is for the rich.
Residents of the shantytowns often endure dangers such as the frequent shootouts between police and heavily armed drug gangs, and when heavy rain falls on slopes crowded with poorly built shacks, nature itself can deal out death.
Rio officials said they are going to step up forced evictions of slum residents living in at-risk areas.
Mayor Eduardo Paes announced that 1,500 families were going to be removed from their homes on in at least two Rio slums, and that more evictions were likely.
"I don't want to spend next summer sleepless, worrying if the rains are going to kill somebody," he told reporters, without saying when the relocations would occur.
The heavy rains plunged Rio into chaos this week, snarling traffic, knocking down trees and power lines, opening up enormous craters in streets and sending wastewater flowing to the white sand beaches of the city of 6 million.
In the Rocinha slum, officials said 16 inches (41 centimetres) of rain has fallen so far this month - three times the amount normally expected for all of April. Similar figures were seen across Rio's metropolitan area.
Rio state Civil Defence said at least 11,000 people were forced from their homes. Officials said potential mudslides threatened at least 10,000 houses in the city.
The toll in Rio has already surpassed that of 2008 flooding and mudslides in the southern state of Santa Catarina that killed nearly 130 people and displaced about 80,000.
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