Floods in southern Brazil have already displaced nearly 400,000 people.

The severe floods that have engulfed Rio Grande do Sul since April 29, the worst climate disaster in the history of southern Brazil’s largest state, have already displaced almost 400,000 people. The information was provided by the State’s Civil Protection Service, where entire towns are flooded and awaiting more heavy rains starting this Friday, in a new partial assessment of the disaster released Thursday evening.

In this new bulletin, Civil Defense officially stated that 395,624 people were forced to flee their homes due to the rain and subsequent devastating floods, a sharp increase in the number of people left homeless compared to the previous bulletin, issued just a few hours back. In the previous bulletin issued at the end of the morning, the number of homeless people was 232.6 thousand, which means that in a few hours there was a sharp increase of more than 163 thousand people left homeless, of which they most of the time left with only clothes on back.

This sharp increase in homelessness was caused in part by the decision of people who were still stranded in flooded areas of cities across the state to finally resign themselves to leaving everything they had and agree to go to shelters due to the high number of days. carried out inside flooded houses, and there are no prospects for the situation to improve in the coming days. With the weather forecast warning of more heavy rain starting this Friday and lasting until at least next week, these residents, who have been without drinking water, without electricity and now without food for days, decided that it was with great sadness. that they went away and left behind everything they had achieved in order to at least save their lives.

On the other hand, residents of cities in the south of the state, the only region of Rio Grande do Sul that was not so badly affected by heavy rains, also began to leave their homes for preventive purposes. The reason is that all the water that has accumulated over the past 11 days in the rest of the state has begun to flow to the south of Rio Grande do Sul and river levels in this region have already risen by one meter in the last 24 hours. alone and should rise even more when the entire volume hitherto dammed arrives, and all the cities on the path along which the floods will pass to the sea will also suffer from severe floods.