SAO PAULO, Brazil — A calamitous scene of destruction unfolded across southeastern Brazil on Sunday as rescue crews raced by boat and helicopter to reach trapped survivors after apocalyptic floods turned city streets into raging rivers of brown mud, killing at least 20 people so far.
The disaster struck with biblical vengeance, as days of relentless downpours triggered landslides and transforming tranquil mountain towns into swirling vortexes of filthy water and debris. Whole neighborhoods disappeared beneath the surface in horrorscape scenes almost too surreal to be believed.
“It’s pure chaos – we’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Renato Casagrande, the shell-shocked governor of Espírito Santo state, where at least 10 people perished in the hard-hit coastal municipality of Mimoso do Sul alone. “There are still cut-off areas where we can’t even fathom the full extent of the damage yet.”
Nowhere was the Biblical wrath of nature more evident than in Petropolis, the bucolic Rio de Janeiro mountain resort town where at least 8 died, many killed by landslides that entombed homes in sludge. In one instance too horrific to describe, firefighters pulled a young girl from the wreckage of her destroyed house on Saturday after a harrowing 16-hour ordeal trapped beneath – her father’s mutilated corpse found shielding her in a final act of love.
Across the region, the tolls of both life and property mounted by the hour as rainfall totals surpassed one month’s worth in just a few days’ time, far exceeding meteorologists’ direst forecasts. Over 700 temporary shelters housed those made homeless by the earth’s acrimonious tantrum.
“These ARE the environmental tragedies that climate change is intensifying,” a grim President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned, pledging federal coordination on response efforts after surveying images of whole urban districts utterly erased, as if reaped by Biblical floods.
Indeed, in Mimoso do Sul, population 25,000, the entire map was redrawn in a frightening deluge that consumed fire trucks and homes alike in a remorseless torrent of muddy devastation. “There’s no town left – it’s all just one massive flood!” exclaimed a breathless rescuer struggling against the untamed rapids.
The disaster was a cruel capstone on a season of freak weather anomalies for southeastern Brazil, still emerging from a record heat wave just weeks ago that approached 150°F when accounting for humidity. Thanks to climate change’s involvement, such schizophrenic atmospheric mood swings are likely only a preview of the new normal to come worldwide.
“This tragic flooding in Brazil showcases the face of global climate disruption – an era of extremes governed by nonlinear laws of physics gone awry, lurching perilously between drought and deluge based on seesawing temperature fluctuations,” said Michael Wehner, an extreme weather attribution expert. “These upended patterns are just the beginning of what’s in store unless emissions are slashed. We’re in uncharted territory now.”
And uncomfortably hot territory at that. As greenhouse gases heat the atmosphere, more moisture gets absorbed into the air during warm phases – only to be violently wrung out later as record-smashing deluges triggered by complex meteorological dominoes falling.
While no single event can be definitively blamed on climate change, calamities like the Brazilian floods illustrate mounting patterns of a new etched-in instability when it comes to weather. Fittingly, temperatures had spiked above 140°F in the region prior to the rains – like a tightly coiled spring waiting to unleash moist fury.
As the planet continues warming, such vicious extremes appear poised to become more frequent and intense worldwide – a sobering thought for a country like Brazil, with its combination of precarious informal housing and propensity for monumental summer downpours.
