Brazil rushed aid on Wednesday by air, over land and through rapidly rising waters to dozens of cities and towns isolated by floods that have killed at least 32 people and left more than 200,000 homeless.
Some complained that aid wasn’t coming fast enough to help flood victims deal with the disaster, which officials said was the worst rainfall and flooding that some parts of the region have seen in two decades.
In an ominous sign, rain continued to fall across a vast region stretching from the Amazon jungle to the northeastern Atlantic coast and meteorologists predicted the bad weather could last for weeks.
Isolated looting was reported in communities cut off by flooding where many houses were immersed to their roofs. TV images showed hundreds of people with pets and chickens jammed inside an abandoned hospital-turned-shelter that had just one working bathroom. Some victims paddled canoes to retrieve belongings from inundated homes, and children said they had no food.
In three Amazon states, at least 3,000 Indians near rivers that overflowed fled to higher ground or into the jungle after seeing their crops of manioc, bananas and potatoes destroyed, said Sebastiao Haji Manchiner, executive secretary of the Brazilian Amazon Indigenous Organization.
Rivers were rising as much as 30cm a day in the hardest hit state of Maranhao, destroying bridges and making it too dangerous for relief workers to navigate some waterways.
“There are some places where the water is so high that not even a boat can get to people,” said army Lieutenant Ivar Araujo, in charge of 200 soldiers trying to help citizens in two towns where homes were submerged to their roof tiles and hundreds packed into shelters in gyms and schools on higher ground.
The unusually heavy rains that have slammed the region for two months are now affecting 10 of Brazil’s 26 states in a zone three times the size of Alaska. It stretches from the normally wet jungle to coastal states known for lengthy droughts, though not all parts of the states have been affected.
Most victims drowned or were killed when mudslides swept over ramshackle homes, but authorities feared the situation could get much worse because many areas had been isolated for days without shipments of food or water.
Civil defense workers used army helicopters to ferry in supplies to some places. Trucks laden with emergency shipments of food and water were forced to stop at highway washouts so aid workers could transfer the goods onto boats for delivery, said Abner Ferreira, a spokesman for Maranhao’s civil defense department.
Ferreira said there were reports of scattered looting, and some people refused to leave homes submerged in 1.5m of water to prevent their belongings from being stolen.
Protests began emerging on Wednesday night from flooded communities that aid was taking too long too arrive.
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