“It didn’t rain — it was an extraordinary amount of water that poured down.”

After powerful mudslides and flooding rushed through a mountainous region north of Rio de Janeiro, dumping a month’s worth of rain overnight and killing at least 94 people, firefighters and terrified residents looked for victims on Wednesday.

The death toll could possibly grow, according to the mayor of Petrópolis, a historic city tucked in the highlands 70 miles from Rio de Janeiro’s beaches. In 2011, a similar calamity killed over 900 individuals in the area. Extreme weather occurrences, according to many experts, are becoming more common as a result of global warming.

Intense downpour that began on Tuesday evening resulted in mudslides that destroyed hundreds of homes on the hillsides above Petrópolis, as well as flooding that wreaked havoc on the streets below. On social media, images and videos showed rivers of mud streaming through the city’s streets, washing everything in its path: vehicles, trees, and even people.

According to Brazil’s National Meteorological Institute, the rains that caused the disaster were the highest the city had seen since 1952.

“What we saw was a really extreme event,” said Cássia de Castro Martins Ferreira, a researcher at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, who studies extreme weather events in the region. “It didn’t rain — it was an extraordinary amount of water that poured down.”

This year’s disaster served as a bitter reminder of the disaster in 2011, when similar mudslides claimed the lives of more than 900 people in the region, making it Brazil’s worst natural disaster in history.

On Wednesday, Carlos Eduardo Ribeiro, 22, was among those looking for missing neighbors. Mr. Ribeiro, who lives across the street from one of the mudslide-ravaged hillside neighborhoods, said he had been rescuing children and the elderly from the rubble.

“My arms hurt, everything hurts from digging people out of the mud. We’ve been digging for hours, hoping to find more people,” he said. “My friends are missing, their houses are gone, everything is buried in mud. It turned into a graveyard here.”

Petrópolis is part of a scenic region with a big national park and high, forested mountains that have become a haven for tourists seeking relief from the coast’s scorching heat. The Brazilian emperor Pedro II founded it in the mid-nineteenth century and held court there during the hot summer months.

However, Ms. Castro explained that the region’s peculiar terrain makes it particularly vulnerable to flooding. The area is often where hot air from the coast meets cold air at higher altitudes, which can lead to storms.

“We have an enormous number of extreme weather events in Petrópolis, related exactly to its location,” she said. But another risk, she said, “is the way that the city has grown.”

Residents have pushed into the hills as Petrópolis has grown, destroying woods that once served as a mudslide buffer and building residences on terrain that is sometimes too steep and unsuited for development.

Following the 2011 mudslides, officials developed strategies to avoid a repeat catastrophe in the region. However, because of a lack of money and political power swings, these plans have progressed slowly.

According to Ms. Castro, the first objective in Brazil should be to build more effective mechanisms to inform communities ahead of major weather events. Only a few neighborhoods in Petrópolis are equipped with weather-warning sirens, and state and local governments have yet to build such systems in other vulnerable areas.

Cláudio Castro, the governor of Rio de Janeiro state, said during a news conference on Wednesday afternoon that preventive action was needed to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

“We are doing this prevention,” he said. “It takes time, it can’t be done all at once.”

During the summer months in Brazil, heavy rains are not uncommon. Extreme weather occurrences, however, are growing more common, according to most experts. Floods in the country’s northeast killed at least 20 people and displaced 50,000 people in December. Last month, torrential rains slammed over the states of So Paulo and Minas Gerais, killing dozens of people.

Image Credit: Getty

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