Brazil still struggles to prepare for storms
Deadly rains continue to wreak havoc
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s tropical storms bring death every summer as torrential rains unleash f loods and mudslides that can bury whole communities in minutes. A single storm killed nearly 1,000 people last year.
This season was going to be different. Government officials promised money would flow to prevent catastrophes. But with the rains and deaths already starting, the government’s own figures show funds are not going where officials say they are needed.
Brazil’s Congress set aside $282 million last year for the federal disaster-prevention program, a jump from the $236 million allotted in 2010. On orders of President Dilma Rousseff, government geologists drew up a list of cities at greatest risk for a natural disaster.
That came in response to torrential rains at this time last year that dissolved hillsides and turned creeks into rampaging rivers in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro, tearing through and burying entire neighborhoods. A total of 918 people died, and the bodies of 215 are still missing.
Yet only 30 percent of the new disaster money has been spent, and little of it has gone to the highest-risk areas, according to the independent group Contas Abertas — “Open Accounts” — which campaigns for transparency in government.
It found that so far, disaster-prevention funds have gone to only two of the 56 cities that the new survey list- ed as high risk. Sao Paulo obtained $86,000 and $171,000 went to Florianopolis, the capital of Santa Catarina state, where 135 people died in floods in 2008.
The small Rio de Janeiro town of Sapucaia, where 20 have died this week, has not gotten any federal help, although it suffered a flood two years ago, said Mayor Anderson Zanon.
“We can’t continue having these tragedies,” he said. “This could have been prevented. We need to build, do containment work, so this doesn’t happen again next year.”
To Rita de Cassia Mendes Morais, who lost four family members and “every brick” of her home in Sapucaia, the promise rings hollow.
“It’s not just about going on television and talking, and making promises,” she said. “They come here now, then they disappear, and the money too. I want the government to have more heart, to look out for us who have survived the worst.”