2013-04-03 20:32
A couple looks at their flooded street from behind their home's window in La Plata, in Argentina's Buenos Aires province. (Natacha Pisarenko, AP)
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La Plata - At least 35 people were killed by flooding
overnight in Argentina's Buenos Aires province, the governor said on Wednesday,
bringing the overall death toll from days of torrential rains to at least 41
and leaving large stretches of the provincial capital under water.
Govenor Daniel Scioli said many people drowned after
trying to take shelter in their cars in Tolosa, an area of the provincial
capital of La Plata.
Heavy rains had killed at least six people in the
nation's capital of Buenos Aires the day before.
Cars were flooded to their rooftops and rainwater flowed
over the windowsills into many houses in La Plata.
People waded out of their neighbourhoods through
chest-high water, and police and neighbours teamed up using rubber motorboats
to evacuate families and pets to higher ground.
"Such intense rain in so little time has left many
people trapped in their cars, in the streets, in some cases electrocuted. We
are giving priority to rescuing people who have been stuck in trees or on the
roofs of their homes," Scioli said.
La Plata "has never seen anything equal" to
this disaster.
The rains also flooded the country's largest refinery,
causing a fire that took hours to put out. The La Plata refinery has suspended
operations as a result, and Argentina's YPF oil company said it has an
emergency team evaluating how to get it restarted again.
The rains - almost 400mm in about two hours - hit
provincial La Plata after causing widespread flooding and power outages and
killing six people in the city of Buenos Aires the day before.
"We lost family heirlooms, appliances,
clothing," said Natalia Lescano, who escaped with her family to a friend's
house on higher ground.
She said they had to get out by themselves, and
complained that authorities weren't doing enough to rescue people.
About 100mm more of rain were expected before the bad
weather passes on Thursday, the national weather service said.
At least 2 500 people were evacuated from their homes in
the La Plata area, which is about 60km southeast of Argentina's capital.
Thousands without power
National Planning Minister Julio de Vido said about 280 000
people remained without power in the city and surrounding province of Buenos
Aires, where most Argentines live. "Our job is focused on restoring
service, but we're going to wait until the equipment dries to guarantee the
safety of the electricity workers, because we don't want any deaths," De
Vido said.
The flooding threatened to ruin food supplies across La
Plata's metropolitan area, which has nearly a million people.
"There's no power in nearly the entire city,"
Casals said, adding that the flooding "wiped out the downtown and the
surrounding neighbourhoods such as Tolosa, Elvira, Los Hornos, with as much as
2m of water, and people are on their roofs."
Many of the evacuees slept in their cars overnight.
Transportation and business of all kinds in the city were at a standstill.
YPF said no injuries were caused by the refinery fire,
which it blamed on "an extraordinary accumulation of rainwater and power
outages in the entire refinery complex." The impact on Argentina's
chronically short fuel supplies wasn't immediately clear.
Six killed
The six killed in Buenos Aires included a subway worker
who was electrocuted and an elderly woman who drowned inside her home.
Many still had standing water in homes, basements,
parking lots and storage rooms on Wednesday.
The governments of President Cristina Fernandez and
Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri sought to blame each other for the chaos, and
the nation's divided media focused their coverage in ways that put one side or
the other in the worst light.
Macri said on Wednesday that the only solution is for the
constantly warring governments to work together on expensive and long-term
public works projects, creating huge underground drainage pipes to carry
increasingly common torrential rains out to the Rio de la Plata.
"Facing the magnitude of what we've lived through, I
insist that public works are what will change this story," Macri said,
describing one such project that was achieved through regional co-operation and
a loan from the World Bank - the kind of borrowing that the government of
President Cristina Fernandez has sought to avoid.
"We need to do the same with all the waterworks that
are needed in the city, in greater Buenos Aires and in the province of Buenos
Aires," Macri said.
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