Deforestation effect: Amazon city collapses due to advance of huge craters

A few steps from the precipice, Deusimar Batista hangs out his clothes under the sun. There was nothing left around his garden: the neighboring house and the street that passed through the gate of his property were swallowed up by the earth.

“Cars, bicycles passed through here… Later, it remained like this, this havoc”explains this short, dark-haired 54-year-old woman, pointing to what is now a cliff barely covered by brush at the edges and garbage at the bottom.

An unusual phenomenon, caused according to experts by a lack of urban planning and aggressive deforestation, is leading Buriticupu, a small Amazonian city in the impoverished Brazilian state of Maranhao (northeast), to a gradual collapse.

If the causes are not stopped, in 30 or 40 years the city could disappear, some experts estimate.

The city, of 70,000 inhabitants, suffers the advance of what they call “voçorocas“, what does it mean “torn earth” in the Tupi-Guarani indigenous language.

They are erosions that start as small cracks in the ground and grow until they become large craters that, seen from the air, look like canyons and advance, swallowing pieces of the city.

The mayor’s office declared the state of “public calamity” on April 26, in an attempt to get state and federal resources to start erosion containment works.

In the city there are 26 voçorocas, and in the case of the deepest it reaches about 70 meters deep, according to a survey by the mayor’s office.

The voçorocas tend to expand with each heavy rain in Buritucupu, a young city that began to grow in the 1970s due to a project to settle rural workers.

Rainy nights have become terrifying for Batista.

“I stay awake, because I’m afraid that it will collapse here or there at any moment.”, assures this woman, who works as a weaver and says she has no other place to go.

“My fear is to sleep and die”, he confesses.

lack of planning

Soil wear is “common to all cities”, explains Augusto Carvalho Campos, a geographer at the Federal University of Maranhao, with a study dedicated to voçorocas.

“But in Buriticupu the alteration is greater“due to urban growth”without proper planning, associated with the lack of basic sanitation and insufficient water and sewage drainage network”, indicates.

The high level of deforestation in Buritucupu has been due to intense logging in recent decades, which has reduced the sandy soil’s ability to absorb moisture, worsening the erosion process, says the professor.

In addition, many voçorocas are recipients of sewage or drainage outlets, contributing to the advance of erosion.

“Containment engineering works are necessary and also reforest the edges of the voçorocas” to limit erosion, says Carvalho.

The earth swallowed some 50 houses, and more than 300 are at risk of collapsing, according to the mayor’s office.

“The administrations were not concerned with the problem and it ended in this”, claims Isaias Neres, president of the Association of Neighbors of Areas affected by Voçorocas.

Local authorities face a request to “immediate help” by the residents, admits Joao Carlos Teixeira, mayor of Buritucupu.

“Deep drainage works, recomposition (soil) will begin soon (…) There is a determination of the government of the republic that this is a safe area”, promises Teixeira, with his back to the oldest voçoroca in the city, which began to grow 20 years ago.

“thunder” noise

On the edge of an abyss of more than 60 meters, Maria dos Santos, 45, laments the advance of one of the largest voçorocas in the city.

“The hole did not exist here, it started less than three years ago”, says dos Santos, with dark skin and curly hair, standing on the cracked asphalt of a partly collapsed bend in the gorge.

The enormous crater appears without protection barriers or signs, a factor of alarm for the residents of the Vila Isaías neighborhood, where it is common to see children playing in the street.

Seven people died after falling into voçorocas, according to the mayor’s office.

The Vila Isaías crater threatens to swallow the house of dos Santos, a precarious construction with mud walls and interspersed wooden planks, a few meters from the fall.

There, too, every storm causes panic.

“We feel afraid, we don’t know when barriers are falling because the noise is the same as thunder. It’s all the same, at the same time”, says the woman, who is waiting for help from the authorities to move.

For now, “the only option is to stay (..) God takes care of us”, he resigns.

Source: AFP