Flash floods hit Lima and northern Peru
Geographic extremes fuel the often deadly force of the mudslides known locally as huaycos
Flash floods and landslides hit parts of Lima, leaving some communities cut off from roads on Saturday, as others in Peru fled rising rivers, and millions fretted that they won’t have drinking water.
The government announced on Saturday that so far this year 72 people have died as a result of heavy rains and flash floods around the country.
Peru’s geographic extremes help fuel the often deadly force of the mudslides known locally as huaycos, the indigenous Quechua word for flash floodlandslide.
The South American nation of over 30 million has plenty of extremes: its Pacific coastal deserts in the west are interrupted by the soaring Andes, famed for the Inca people and Machu Picchu in the south. Further east, Peru has hot Amazon basin lowlands.
The tremendously steep mountains combine with many rocky and sandy areas that lack the topsoil found in more temperate places, meaning fewer trees are there to stop mudslides.
After weeks of heavy rain swept toward the coast late this week, many riverbeds in coastal areas went from empty to overflowing in no time.
In Lima, some residents on the outskirts of the capital of 10 million awoke on Friday to realise their bedrooms were filling with water.
On Thursday and Friday, 10 people died in a landslide in the northern town of Otuzco. Seven of them were in trucks crushed by the huge flow of earth.
Others found themselves cut off by mudslides that blocked portions of the main highway linking Lima to the centre of the country.
In one dramatic scene, rescuers used zip lines to help residents of Lima’s Huachipa neighbourhood escape over the torrent of brown water that was once their street, as it swallowed up cars and trucks.
The floods have been triggered by the weather event known as El Nino, a warming of surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that wreaks havoc on weather patterns every few years.
But this year it has hit Peru particularly hard.
“It’s a difficult situation, there’s no doubt about it. But we have the resources” to deal with it, said President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
The government announced it would release 2.5 billion soles ($760 million) in emergency funds to rebuild affected areas.
Over half a million people were getting assistance.
While Peruvians have been dealing with huaycos for centuries, many poor residents of cities and towns build makeshift homes in areas that they do not realise could be flash-flood zones. Authorities tell them to move, but they have nowhere to go. Authorities’ presence in the poorest peripheral districts, many perched on mountainsides, can be inconsistent.