Authorities in the city of Petropolis, Brazil, on Thursday sounded the alarm sirens to evacuate several at-risk areas before the arrival of new heavy rains, two days after torrential rains that caused terrible floods and landslides causing at least 117 deaths.

Residents of several neighborhoods in this city of 300,000, located in a mountainous region 60 km north of Rio de Janeiro, were called in the late afternoon by alarms and text messages to go to the shelter with relatives or in shelters "due to the volume of rain falling on the city and will continue, with moderate to strong intensity, in the coming hours", indicated the local Civil Defense.

At least two streets were closed and their inhabitants evacuated after a slide of "boulders", which caused no injuries, added the relief.

This new precipitation comes 48 hours after torrential rains which transformed the picturesque streets of this very touristy city into rivers of mud, destroying houses and carrying dozens of cars and buses with their passengers.

Tiny hope

While the burials of victims followed one another at the municipal cemetery, rescuers and volunteers continued Thursday to search the mud and the rubble in search of missing people, with an increasingly tenuous hope of finding them alive.

According to the authorities, some 500 firefighters, helped by hundreds of volunteers, are mobilized to search the rubble.

The number of missing remains undetermined, with only 41 bodies, according to TV Globo, having been identified so far.

The local police reported 116 missing, against 35 listed by the public prosecutor.

Thursday, around 850 people had already been collected in improvised shelters, mostly public schools.

President Jair Bolsonaro, on an official visit to Russia earlier this week, then to Hungary on Thursday, was to go to Petropolis on Friday, upon his return to Brazil, to fly over the disaster areas.

With AFP

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