3 min readTeresopolis (brazil)Jan 16, 2011 11:03 AM IST
First published on: Jan 16, 2011 at 11:03 AM IST
Brazil has declared three days of national mourning for at least 610 people killed near Rio de Janeiro this week in the country’s worst flood disaster on record.
Emergency workers in the disaster zone,in the Serrana region just north of Rio,were overwhelmed by the body count. Refrigerator trucks had to be brought in to store corpses.
Workers transporting bodies said they feared the overall death toll could top 1,000 as rescuers reached outlying hamlets.
President Dilma Rousseff declared on Saturday the three days of mourning,government news agency Agencia Brasil reported. Rio de Janeiro state authorities said their state will observe a full week of mourning starting tomorrow.
As of late Saturday,the death toll stood at 610 people,with the worst-hit towns being Teresopolis,Nova Friburgo and Petropolis,civil defense officials said. Outlying villages also reported deaths.
An estimated 14,000 people were assisted by rescue workers or lost their homes in the Serrana area towns hardest hit about 100 kilometers 60 miles from coastal Rio,civil defense figures showed.
The single hardest hit town was Nova Friburgo,where 274 people were killed. Nearby Teresopolis had 263 dead,55 were killed in Petropolis and 18 lost their lives in Sumidouro,officials said. “I think in the end we’ll see more than 1,000 bodies,” said a funeral worker in Teresopolis,Mauricio Berlim. “In one village near here,Campo Grande,there were 2,500 homes and not one is left standing.”
Authorities also made an urgent appeal for donations of blood,bottled water,food and medicine.
At least four refrigerated trucks were parked out the front of an overflowing makeshift morgue inside a Teresopolis church.
At the town’s cemetery,a dog curled up at the grave site of his mistress,a woman named Cristina Maria de Santana,refusing to leave even though she had been buried two days earlier,said workers.
Body recovery efforts have been hampered by tons of mud that,in some cases,have cut villages off and made them accessible only by helicopter — but flights were limited by persistent rain that hindered visibility in the rough terrain to just a couple hundred meters yards.
At least a dozen remote hamlets remained out of touch,and one witness reported seeing a group of people buried in their car by a river of reddish mud.
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