APOCALYPTIC SCENES

HUGE parts of Welsh Patagonia remain devastated by floods caused by the worst rainfall in 40 years.

Residents of the city of Comodoro Rivadavia have faced apocalyptic scenes, after 80% of the city was destroyed.

Homes have been swept away or wrecked by mud.

Upturned cars litter the city. Roads have been ripped up by the water, leaving gaping cracks in the ground.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Chubut province – and eight of its 16 counties are facing agricultural disaster as a consequence of the weather.

Of the 25,000 Welsh speakers in Argentina, 5,000 are understood to live in the Chubut region.

New Zealander Jeremy Wood lives in the province.

“It has completely devastated the town, people have been killed,” he said.

“There are some very traumatic pictures on the net, of streets and cars being washed away.

“The Welsh community is quite small and the government is going to have to help to try and rebuild the town.”

Mudslides have left huge areas isolated and without 21st-century communications.

Ricardo Irianni Chubut Valley.

He said: “Where I live, the main problem was not a flood, it was that the heavy rains that carried a lot of silt and clay in heavy mud from the nude soils of the plateau into the Chubut river.

“As the companies that bring the drinkable water take it directly from this river, this meant that the water could not be purified for many days for the population of the cities.” lives in the

These include Dolavon, Trelew, Rawson, Porth Madryn and Gaiman – a cultural centre of the Welsh settlement region known as “Y Wladfa”.

“The stock of purified water was over and, as the system is a little bit old and was not well prepared for this adversity, it took a couple of weeks to recover the level of purification of the water,” Ricardo said.

The situation has now been fixed but people remain “very angry” with the authorities.

“The second and huge problem, catastrophic and devastating, was the heavy rain – more than 400mm in a couple of days – in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, 370km south from here,” Ricardo said.

“That destroyed houses, roads and facilities.

“Here the rain carried mud not to

Patagonia, where thousands of people speak Welsh, has suffered torrential rains and mudslides, with many homes swept away. Large parts of Patagonia remain devastated by floods