Rains in Rio Grande do Sul: the despair of spending hours without contact with relatives stranded by the water

Before losing cell phone contact with her daughter, Thais, in the early hours of this Sunday (5/5), small business owner Elizabeth Vitalino had already lost a significant part of the wealth she had accumulated throughout her life.

Isolated by water, the establishment had furniture and merchandise. Desperate, the shopkeeper could not imagine that, hours later, dozens of kilometers away, she herself would be reached by the waters.

Beth lives in a ground floor apartment in Humaitá, a former industrial and affordable housing area that has started to attract interest in the real estate market despite the risk of flooding.

The place is two kilometers away from Arena do Grêmio and less than three kilometers from Salgado Filho International Airport – the stadium had already been taken by water on Friday (3/5) while the airport, also affected, should be left without operations this week.

It was on Friday that, as a precaution, Beth and her neighbors removed their cars from the condominium parking lot. The vehicles were parked on a nearby lawn.

“Everyone has taken their cars out of their garages now. It will also go up there. I’ll go look there in a bit”, Beth replied to her daughter in an audio shared with the report.

Beth was right. Within a few hours, water had entered the garage. A little more, and the cars were submerged.

Without power, the shopkeeper told her daughter that she would leave her cell phone off for an hour to save battery.

“The battery is almost finished, daughter. Here, there are about three fingers left to enter the water inside the apartment. There’s no way out of here. It’s crazy,” she reported.

“It all went away. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero.”

It was the last message. Beth did not appear on her cell phone again, as she had announced.

Then began the hours of despair when Thais had no news of her mother.

On social media, the young woman shared a message of help: “I need a rescue number that works, I need to get my mother out of her apartment in Humaitá. She lives on the ground floor, water has already come in, I haven’t been in contact with her for hours. Need help”.

Some teams were contacted, but nothing.

Beth’s whereabouts and condition were only known at 5:24 pm on Sunday.

Thais still didn’t know exactly where her mother was staying, but she was safe. It was enough to celebrate, she told the reporter.

Further south, in the São Geraldo neighborhood, also in the Fourth District, psychologist Sabrina Zotti, 31, found in a group of neighbors organized on WhatsApp the dose of security and comfort necessary to face the tragedy.

A resident of a condominium on Avenida Poland, she decided to stay there, along with other residents, as she thought it would be difficult for the water to reach the third floor, where she lives.

“We started to build together what to do. We talked to the neighbors and the condominium. They created a calamity group with residents who are part of the Fire Department, nurses and engineers,” she reported.

On Saturday, some decided to leave the building. Others, like Sabrina, chose to stay due to the approaching night and the advanced water level.

“We are on the third floor, we have food, water. We have some access to our cell phones,” she told BBC News Brasil, via audio message, on Sunday morning.

Born in Encantado, in Vale do Taquari, one of the regions most affected by floods in recent months, Sabrina has lived with the effects of floods since childhood.

“It’s a city that has always had problems with flooding. Unfortunately, I grew up seeing families and homes destroyed by floods. It’s very sad to see these repetitions, always with increasingly intense scenarios”, he said.

Despite having escaped unharmed, Sabrina is emotionally shaken, and her choked voice forced her to frequently interrupt her testimony.

Sometimes the sound of a low-flying helicopter or people screaming on rescue boats were noticeable in the background. From the window, she saw scenes she could not have imagined hours before.

“I see families crossing this water with dogs and children on their backs. With a backpack or nothing, just leaving their homes. Civil Defense boats come to rescue people. This is an extremely bleak scenario,” she commented.

Sabrina highlighted the spirit brought about by the unity of the residents.

“Building this support network was extremely important. We are able to help people share even the anger that arises in situations like this, the anger, the crying,” he said. “And also information that there are actions being developed, people able to help, boats arriving”, .

According to psychologist Georges Hilal Jequis, who is part of a group of professionals involved in voluntary assistance to people affected by the flood throughout the State, the crisis created in Rio Grande do Sul requires, in addition to material support, psychic mobilization to “deal with the trauma that was installed in the face of the inexorable nature of nature’s violence”.

For the professional, social networks have a positive role in connecting at a time when public authorities are unable to deal with the catastrophe alone. More than 70 people have died, and more than 100 are missing.

Porto Alegre City Hall estimates that 70% of the city is without water. The number of homeless people in the State has already exceeded 100 thousand.

Technology helps victims in multiple ways. At 2am on Sunday (5/5), an interdisciplinary group of five professors from the faculties of Social Communication, Information Technology and Computer Science and Architecture and Urbanism at UniRitter, in the capital, made the SOSRS web application available for free download. The resource allows people in need of help to have their location made available to volunteer rescue teams and security forces.

The application was developed between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.

“We thought about setting up a quick way to connect those who have any nautical equipment and those who need help”, explained Sandra Henriques, professor at the Faculty of Social Communication who participated in the initiative.

In around 15 hours, SOSRS had recorded 300 ransom requests in Porto Alegre and neighboring municipalities.

One of the main difficulties faced by workers on lifesaving missions is finding the exact location of victims on submerged roads.

“What sets us apart is that, by allowing rescuers to go to exact addresses provided by those who need help, time and resources are saved,” said the professor.

Another initiative that gained rapid support since Saturday was the profile Tô Salvo Canoas (@tosalvocanoas), on Instagram. The space is used for people rescued in the municipality to inform family members and authorities that they are safe. Often, those assisted are children and elderly people in vulnerable situations.

The profile also shares information about 26 shelters available for those in need and a PIX key to receive donations for the locations. In just over 24 hours, Tô Salvo Canoas made more than 130 publications and gained 113 thousand followers.

“The demands are incessant and growing, and the networks help a little to organize this information that the State cannot handle”, says psychologist Georges Hilal Jequis.

Jequis warned, however, that it is necessary to be careful with the dissemination of false information, even though he assesses that the impact of disinformation, at the moment, is reduced.

“There is a historic and very important civil mobilization to get through this moment and overcome it in the future”, he assessed.