The rains in Rio de Janeiro in the last days resulted in at least 16 deaths in the municipalities of Paraty, Angra dos Reis and Mesquita are part of a rainy season “completely atypical compared to other years”, according to Osvaldo de Moraes, director of the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts for Natural Disasters (Cemanden).
In an interview with CNN this Sunday (3), Moraes cited other deaths in disasters in BahiaMinas Gerais, São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro itself, in Petrópolissince the beginning of the rainy season in the Southeast.
“We are now moving towards the end of the rainy season in the Southeast, we should enter a much less intense rainfall regime, but there are other regions with different rainfall seasonality. The Northeast begins to draw attention. Different regions have different systems,” she says.
For him, situations like the one in Rio de Janeiro are the result of two threats, the natural and the social.
“In addition to the natural threat, which is the intensity, the increase in the frequency of extreme events likely caused by climate change, we are also experiencing an increase in social vulnerability and the number of people exposed to risk. The combination of these two threats is responsible for the disaster”, he says.
The expert says that Brazil has grown a lot in recent years in the area of monitoring and issuing alerts, but the evolution was small in terms of risk perception.
“People continue to live in risk areas and they do not know exactly what the risk is to which they are exposed, how they must act not only at the moment when the disaster is happening, but in a continuous sequence of preparation, education, to be better. prepared for vulnerability to decrease”.
In case of Angra dos Reisa rain in 48 hours it was 821 millimeters, “something indescribable and unthinkable”, since the forecast for the entire month of April was for rain of 220 millimeters. “That is, in two days it rained in Angra dos Reis four times what was expected for the entire month of April”.
According to him, the rain was the result of a combination of a cold front in the region, the moisture that left the Atlantic Ocean due to high temperatures and the transport of moisture by an air mass.
Now, this wind is changing direction, which should reduce the rain in the region in the next few hours and even stop the rain between the afternoon and evening.
With the change, Cemaden opened alerts for Teresópolis and municipalities in Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais, but with “moderate level alerts, only attention for monitoring”.
Source: CNN Brasil
