Killer floods becoming phenomenon in Brazil

SÃO PAULO — Unrelenting rains for much of the weekend complicated the search for scores of people still missing after violent floods stirred mudslides that ripped through hillside communities around Rio de Janeiro, killing more than 600 people since last week.

Communications, electricity and potable water were still lacking in areas, leaving disaster experts to lament Brazil's lack of preparedness for deadly rains, which they say are becoming more common.

The death toll climbed to 617 early Sunday, with nearly 14,000 reported homeless or having abandoned their homes, according to Rio de Janeiro State officials.

For much of its history, Brazil has been blessed like almost no other country of its size to be almost free of such calamities. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, erupting volcanoes — none have proved threats to Brazil.

"But in the last few years the increasing frequency of floods, high winds and storms has become part of the new normal of Brazil," said Margareta Wahlstrom, the assistant secretary-general for the United Nations' International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

Brazil has experienced 37 disastrous floods since 2000, said Debarati Guha Sapir, a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels who heads a World Health Organization collaborating center on disasters. Seven occurred in 2009 and four in 2008. More than 280 people died in Rio State in flooding and landslides last year, and at least 75 more in São Paulo State. More than 130 died during heavy rains in Santa Catarina State in 2008.

But disaster experts say the stark difference in the death tolls in Brazil and Australia, where at least 28 people have died in flooding in the northeast in the past two weeks, reveal a wide gap in the preparedness of the countries.

The hillside areas around Rio lacked early-warning systems or effective community organizations that might have helped residents to wake one another as the rains intensified last Tuesday night, disaster experts and residents said.