RIO DE JANEIRO — The landslides that devastated Petropolis this week demolished houses and ripped families apart, scarred hillsides and hearts, left at least 136 dead and more than 200 missing.
And it was all largely predictable — and to some degree, preventable.
Rapid urbanization, poor planning, lack of financing for subsidized housing — all of these things have afflicted this mountain city in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state. Little has been done in response to repeated warnings about the risks of mountainside construction, researchers as well as current and former public servants told The Associated Press.
And with evidence indicating that climate change is causing more intense rainfall, peril has only increased — not just for Petropolis, but elsewhere as well.
More than 1,500 people have died in similar landslides in recent decades in that portion of the Serra do Mar range. There have been more than 400 deaths from heavy storms in Petropolis alone since 1981.
Antônio Guerra, a geography professor in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, has studied weather-related catastrophes in Petropolis for almost 30 years. He has visited dozens of sites where houses and lives were swallowed by torrents of mud, and investigated the causes.
“Rain is the great villain, but the main cause is poor land use. There’s a total lack of planning,” Guerra said in a phone interview.
Petropolis’ haphazard sprawl is recent. Nestled in the mountains some 40 miles from Rio de Janeiro and named for a former Brazilian emperor, Petropolis was among the nation’s first planned cities.
Earlier settlers built stately homes along its waterways. But in recent decades the city’s prosperity has drawn newcomers from poorer regions and the population grew to about 300,000. Mountainsides are now covered with small homes packed tightly together, constructed by people who aren’t fully aware of the dangers. Many have built without proper permissions because they can’t afford to do so elsewhere.
Many high-risk areas are even more vulnerable due to deforestation or inadequate drainage, Guerra said. As time goes by, people forget disasters and return to devastated areas, building houses on unsafe ground.
For nearly two decades, Yara Valverde led the local office of the federal environmental regulator. In 2001, she started the city’s first hydrogeological risk alert system, installing plastic bottles in communities to collect rainfall. When they reached a certain level, sirens blasted.
There was no public money allotted for the program, so she enlisted volunteers.
Between 2007 and 2010, Guerra and a team of civil engineers and geologists mapped risky areas in Petropolis and sent their findings to the city. The next January, rain set off landslides that claimed nearly 1,000 lives, 71 of them in Petropolis. It was considered Brazil’s worst natural disaster.
The city has recognized the problem. In 2017, authorities noted that 18 percent of the city — including about 20,000 households — was at high or very high risk. Yet another 7,000 would also need to be relocated, according to a plan devised by the city which called for construction of affordable housing units and a halt to new construction in at-risk areas.
