Rain

When it comes to the vagaries of nature, Brazil is particularly blessed. Down here we don't get volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, typhoons or hurricanes.

We get rain.

But before you conclude that rain is entirely inoffensive, peruse the pictures below.

Our rain comes in the form of torrential downpours – as much as a foot of it in twenty-four hours.

 

And it causes landslides.

In the hills above Rio de Janeiro, a series of slides began at about 3 AM last Wednesday morning, catching people in their beds and sweeping them away.

 Or burying them alive in the rubble of their homes.

One victim, a baby just two months old, was washed away in his crib. His body has yet to be found. One woman feared she’d lost up to fifteen family members, including five nieces and nephews.

In all, more than 600 people perished.

The story repeats itself, year after year, during the rainy season.

How many die?

Nobody knows.

Here’s why: Landslides seldom bring down wealthy communities. Landslides almost always bring down shantytowns. (favelas). Those shantytowns are constructed on land too poor, or inaccessible, for anyone with a modicum of money in the bank to be interested in. And the occupation of that land is technically illegal and always unregistered. When the whole community slides down the hill some of the bodies are recovered. Others often disappear beneath the rubble – and stay there.

The worst, this year, may be yet to come.

  

In 2010, in many parts of this country, it rained, almost constantly, from the beginning of March until mid-April.

Here, on Bumba Hill, just across the Niteroi bridge from Rio de Janeiro, a favela was built on what had been a garbage dump up until the late 1970’s. Experts had warned, time and again, that it was going to plunge down the hillside one day. But people built anyway. The municipality did nothing.

And then the rains came.
More than two hundred died.
Some continue to lie in permanent graves among the still-rotting garbage. 

In Angra dos Reis, on the other side of Rio, the disaster was similar, but on a much smaller scale. Estimates of deaths don’t exceed forty.

Forty.

About the same number of people who died during the recent floods in Australia.

But here's the rub: There, they got more than two meters of rain. We only got about a meter and forty centimeters of it.

Lots less rain, more than 15 times as many fatalities.

Depressing?

You bet.

Unavoidable?

Certainly not.

Is the government going to do anything about it anytime soon?

Unlikely.

This is Brazil.

And, at times like these, it breaks my heart.

Leighton - Monday