At least five people have died and about 430 have been injurednine of them seriously, after a tornado with winds of up to 250 kilometers per hour caused enormous destruction in its path in cities of Paraná, a state in southern Brazil bordering Paraguay, the Civil Defense reported this Saturday.
The most affected cities have been Río Bonito do Iguaçu, where four fatalities have been reported, and Guarapuava, with one death, but At least 14 municipalities have declared a state of emergency after the tornado passed.
According to the Civil Defense, the phenomenon, with strong winds, storms and hail, has destroyed about 80% of the buildings from Río Bonito do Iguaçu, a city of about 13,500 inhabitants and where strong winds have unraveled dozens of homes and knocked down numerous trees and power line poles.
“Between 80 and 90% of the city was collapsed. We still do not have the exact number of people who are unsheltered,” said the Secretary of Public Security of Paraná, Colonel Hudson Leoncio Teixeira. At least 3,000 homes in this city continued without electricity and water services in the early hours of this Saturday.
The government of the state of Paraná has set up a field hospital in the municipality to meet the high demand for health services and has admitted that the number of victims may be higher.
“Our teams said they found a war scene. We have firefighters from various regions of Paraná carrying out search and rescue tasks for victims. Our priority is to save the people who have not yet been located,” said the deputy commander general of the Paraná Fire Department, Jonas Emmanuel Benghi Pinto.
According to meteorological services, the destruction was caused by a tornado that formed inside a supercellas extreme storms are known that are characterized by their long duration and the presence of a main rotating updraft.
“The Civil Defense and our security forces are on alert, mobilized and attending to the cities affected by the strong storms,” the governor of Paraná, Ratinho Junior, who plans to travel to the region this Saturday, stated in a message on his social networks.
The other two states in southern Brazil, Río Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, have declared a state of emergency due to the record of an extratropical cyclone moving north. The governorate of Sao Paulo, the most populated state in Brazil, has sent alert messages to the inhabitants of several municipalities regarding the possibility of this cyclone reaching their territory this Saturday.
The alerts occur two days after the start in the Brazilian city of Belém, in the Amazon, of 0, in which global adaptation measures are analyzed given the conviction that extreme phenomena have multiplied throughout the world as a consequence of climate changes.
