Brazil Mudslides and Etna Rumbles

Well, it’s ‘an interesting day’ in our global neighborhood…

We’ve got heavy rains in Brazil leading to mudslides and lives lost, and then Mt. Etna has had a burp.

Pretty much all around the globe on that Equatorial Rain Belt we’ve got a load of water dropping from the sky. Northern Australia, Colombia, Venezuela, and now Brazil.

On the Fox News Crawler I saw a statement that they had had 3 months rain in one week, or some such, but have not found a print reference yet.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/13/brazil-flood-deaths.html

Walls of earth and water swept away homes in the mountains north of Rio de Janeiro, wiping out families and leaving survivors scrambling Thursday to reach trapped neighbours.

Officials and a television report indicated the death toll in the slides climbed above 350, with at least 50 people still missing.

“We were like zombies, covered in mud, in the dark, digging and digging,” said Geisa Carvalho, 19, about the minutes after slides hit Wednesday around 3 a.m. in Teresopolis.
[…]
Deadly flooding and slides hit neighbouring states in recent days as well.

Heavy rainfall caused havoc in Minas Gerais state north of Rio, where 16 people died in the past month and dozens of communities are in a state of emergency.

In Sao Paulo, flooding has paralyzed main thoroughfares in the capital city since Sunday and 21 people died in collapsed homes, mudslides and flooding throughout the state.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12180079

More than 800 rescuers are conducting searches and the Brazilian navy is sending a field hospital to the area.

Morgues in the affected towns were full, with churches and police stations receiving bodies.

Officials in Brazil’s civil defence department have warned there could be hundreds more bodies yet to be recovered in Teresopolis alone, the Globo media organisation reported.

One area of Teresopolis, Campo Grande, remains cut off entirely and is yet to be reached by any rescuers. It is feared 150 people may be buried there.

One resident of Teresopolis, Angela Marina de Carvalho Silva, told the Associated Press news agency she feared she might have lost 15 relatives, including five nieces and nephews.

“There are so many disappeared – and so many that will probably never be found,” she said.

She said she had taken refuge at a neighbour’s house on higher ground and watched the water sweep away cars, tree branches and animals and destroy the homes of friends and family.
[…]
Nova Friburgo, Teresopolis and Petropolis
The towns, which lie in a region called the Serrana, are popular holiday destinations for city dwellers keen to enjoy fresh mountain air and verdant surroundings
They also attract mountain climbers from around the country and elsewhere
In the 19th Century they were a popular summer destination for emperors and aristocrats. Petropolis was named after Emperor Pedro II, and is known as the Imperial City of Brazil
The area also has historical links with German and Swiss settlers
Tourism has replaced agriculture as the region’s principal economic activity
The towns’ populations have quadrupled over the last 30 years, according to the local governor

Mount Etna has a small eruption

I’d mentioned Etna just a couple of days ago.

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/of-etna-and-kizimen/

and now it’s increased it’s ‘action’ just a little. Fox News has a nice picture of it, but their text is a bit slim.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/13/mount-etna-comes-life-brief-eruption/

ROME – Italy’s Mount Etna has come back to life with a brief eruption that sent lava down its slopes and a cloud of ash into the sky, forcing the overnight closure of a nearby airport.

The volcanology institute in Catania, eastern Sicily, said Thursday that a two-hour eruption overnight sent a little stream of lava down the eastern slope of the mountain. Nobody was injured.

The volcano also spewed out ash, which rained down and forced Catania’s Fontanarossa airport to shut down overnight, canceling or diverting a few domestic flights.

Then again, that’s pretty much all the news there is in the event… Burp, airplanes go somewhere else….

Brisbane

Is having an abandoned construction site with a 7 story hole in the ground turn into a lake… that may be consuming a nearby street…

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/cave-in-fears-for-brisbanes-mary-st-due-to-flood-damage/story-e6freoof-1225987488079

This is the kind of stuff you find in Science Fiction Stories, not in the real world…

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