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BBC MUNDO RADIO
By Douglas Engle
NITEROI, Brazil (Reuters) - Rescue workers scrambled on Thursday to find dozens of residents feared buried by a landslide near Rio de Janeiro as the death toll from heavy rains in and around Brazil's second-largest city rose to 153.
The heaviest rains in more than 40 years, which started on Monday, triggered close to 200 mudslides that crushed shacks in hillside slums, causing most of the deaths and leaving thousands of people homeless.
Search teams rescued 21 people from the wreckage of houses swept away by a mudslide late on Wednesday in a slum in the city of Niteroi, across a bay from Rio. They said six bodies were pulled from the mud and at least another 70 are believed missing from that incident alone.
Marlene Pineiro, a resident of the Bumba Hill neighborhood where the mudslide happened, said she heard a loud noise as earth began moving under her house and managed to jump out of a window before it collapsed completely.
"We ran and everything starting coming down ... the kitchen, my brothers' room, the living room," she said. "But in the other room it stopped, so when that happened we opened the window ... we jumped into the woods and ran away."
Brazil's Globo news television network showed images from that neighborhood of a house torn open, exposing a bedroom with a bed covered in debris and a television set still perched on a night-stand.
Several local media outlets said 200 people were buried beneath the mudslide there, some citing Rio's civil defense agency.
Deputy Governor of Rio de Janeiro state Luiz Fernando Pezao said some 200 people lived in Bumba Hill but there was no way to know how many were there when the landslide happened.
Civil defense officials contacted by Reuters also said they could not confirm the information.
"I don't know what to do, I want to help but I don't even know where to start. My cousins are buried in there, the agony is enormous," said Gisele Pimenta, 30, a Bumba Hill resident, in an interview with Globo.
APPEAL FOR FUNDS
Authorities say at least 10,000 houses still are at risk of collapse and the national government has sent security forces to help with rescue operations. Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes has appealed to the federal government for 370 million reais ($208 million) in aid for emergency operations.
Large waves pounded Rio's scenic Copacabana beach as rains resumed and authorities warned people not to swim or surf until conditions returned to normal.
Most of the damage was concentrated in slums where about a fifth of Rio's people live, often in precarious shacks. Bumba Hill was built atop a former garbage dump.
Paes said the city would give top priority to finding those still trapped under mud and rubble, Brazilian news network Globo reported, even if it meant diverting resources from fixing roads and improving transit in the city.
"The priority for all of us now is human lives, between opening roads and saving lives we would rather save lives," he said, according to Globo.
Niteroi was the worst affected area with at least 85 people dead, the fire department said, while 48 were killed in Rio.
For a third day, Paes urged Rio residents to stay home or at least avoid traveling to the city center as weather forecasts called for rains to continue until the weekend.
Traffic was flowing normally in most parts of the city on Thursday in contrast to two days earlier when the rains turned highways into lakes, left drivers stranded in cars and forced some commuters to walk home through miles of soaked streets.
The transportation chaos renewed attention on Rio's poor infrastructure as it prepares to host the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.
The International Olympic Committee said in a statement on Wednesday it planned to have discussions with Rio officials once the situation returns to normal about how the disaster might affect preparations for the games.
(Writing by Brian Ellsworth, editing by Stuart Grudgings and Vicki Allen)
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