Rescue teams in helicopters searched for dozens of people missing as a result of floods and landslides that cut a trail of destruction through small Andean towns and killed at least 37 people in Venezuela over the past few days.
Rescue workers searching for victims began digging in what remained of Santa Cruz de Mora, where a swollen river tore through town on Saturday, devouring homes and a bus terminal, Colonel Eslain Longa Tirado said at the nearby El Vigia military air base.
At least 13 people were killed in the town, President Hugo Chavez said in a radio and television address, adding that seven died in two other towns in the same remote river valley.
”I want to express my sorrow to you in the Andes,” Chavez said.
The latest deaths brought to 37 the number of people killed as a result of flooding and landslides triggered by an almost week-long period of torrential rains across the country. At least 15 000 people in the afflicted areas were left homeless by the flooding.
Officials had earlier said 39 were killed, and the reason behind the discrepancy was not immediately clear.
In Colombia, similar flooding in the north-central part of the country, near Venezuela, has left at least 25 people dead, and forced more than 25 000 others to abandon their homes.
About 10 to 15 buses were at the bus terminal in Santa Cruz de Mora when the Mocoties River overflowed and tore through the town, said Colonel Antonio Rivero, the country’s civil protection director.
It wasn’t clear how many people were on the buses at the time.
Rivero said 39 people are listed as missing, but that there could be many more. He said high water and heavy rains were preventing rescue workers from getting inside many of the buses, which were stuck in mud and, in some cases, submerged.
Hundreds of soldiers, volunteers and paramedics were helping ferry emergency food shipments to victims and evacuating the injured by helicopter.
One man arrived at the El Vigia air base on a stretcher with a broken leg. Another man lay almost motionless in a stretcher, his arm raised over his face in apparent pain as he was placed in a helicopter to be taken to a hospital.
”The house fell on top of him,” said the man’s 24-year-old daughter, Xiomara Sepulveda.
The floods came early on Saturday morning, ripping through the towns in the river valley, said Mariela Medina, a 47-year-old Venezuelan who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, but who had returned to her family home in Tovar on the eve of her son’s wedding.
”I’ve never seen anything so horrible,” Medina said. ”Everything that was near the river is gone.”
She said houses disappeared and roads were ripped apart by the force of the water.
”The people fled up into the mountains, with suitcases, whatever they could take,” she said.
Firefighters said at least four bodies floated downstream and were found kilometres away.
Medina, along with her son and his bride-to-be, were evacuated by helicopter, while 27 family and friends who had come for the wedding remained stranded. Many sections of highway near the river simply disappeared in the floods.
While the rain had stopped in the morning, it started up again in the afternoon, complicating rescue efforts.
At least 42 were wounded in the floods in the past week across Venezuela, and about 16 000 people are homeless, Chacon said.
Chavez’s government has declared an emergency in the capital of Caracas and nine states, and has approved a $52-million emergency fund.
Chavez said the weather is expected to improve for the next few days. He also said the unusually heavy rains appeared due to global climate change, and he criticised the United States for not signing the Kyoto Protocol to join the effort to reduce carbon dioxide and other ”greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere.
”The whole world has to do this, especially the ones that consume the most,” Chavez said, an outspoken critic of US foreign policy.
‘Immense tragedy’ in Colombia
The flooding in north-central Colombia has killed at least 25 people and forced thousands of others to leave their homes, the government’s disaster chief said on Sunday.
A total of 25 000 people were forced to abandon their homes due to the flooding that began on Saturday in and around Bucaramanga, 300km north-east of Bogota, said Eduardo Jose Gonzalez, director of the Disaster Attention and Prevention Office.
The rainstorms began in the area on Friday afternoon and continued nonstop for about 20 hours, police officials said. Most of the deaths came when the Oro and Frio rivers overflowed their banks, sending water flowing into the flimsy, makeshift homes in shantytowns that line the rivers.
About 5 000 homes were destroyed by floods or mudslides, Gonzalez said, speaking by telephone from the devastated area.
”It’s an immense tragedy,” President Alvaro Uribe told reporters on Sunday. As the death toll continued to rise, Uribe sent several Cabinet members to the zone to help coordinate relief efforts.
In a strategy used in the past by Uribe’s administration, the government is looking for properties in the region seized from drug traffickers and plans to allow people left homeless by the floods to live there temporarily.
Colombia is the world’s leading producer of cocaine and produces much heroin.
Police officials in Bucaramanga said on Sunday the rain had stopped and that the sun had begun to emerge from the clouds. But meteorologists are forecasting more rains in the coming days. — Sapa-AP