Fresh downpours in southeastern Brazil pushed the death toll from flooding and landslides in Minas Gerais to 54, with rescuers still searching for 14 missing people on Thursday. The rain brought more fear to Juiz de Fora, Uba and surrounding areas just days after a deluge late Monday buried houses, triggered landslides and forced thousands of people from their homes.
More than 5,000 residents have been displaced since the storm, and local officials said new alerts were sent to cellphones as rain continued to lash the region. In Parque Burnier, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in Juiz de Fora, residents described the collapse of the riverbank and the panic that followed as civil defense teams called them to evacuate. In Tres Moinhos, three houses were buried by landslides in the early hours of Thursday after their occupants had already been moved out.
The disaster has also sharpened political scrutiny. Governor Romeu Zema rejected accusations that his administration had cut investment in disaster prevention, after a television report claimed spending to prevent such disasters had fallen by 95 percent over three years. That dispute is now part of the wider conversation about how much responsibility state governments bear when a weather emergency becomes a mass displacement event.
Juiz de Fora’s mayor said the municipality had experienced its wettest February on record, which helps explain why the damage spread so quickly once the rain returned. The event also fits into a broader pattern of extreme weather disasters in Brazil, where floods, fires and drought have increasingly been linked by scientists to the effects of global warming. Those links do not lessen the immediate human toll, but they do underscore why the state is facing this kind of crisis more often.
For families still waiting for news of the missing, the numbers matter less than the continuing instability. Residents returned to damaged neighborhoods only long enough to recover furniture, appliances, mattresses and even pets before leaving again. The search for the missing continued, the rain kept falling and the emergency remained active. In Minas Gerais, the danger was not a past event. It was still unfolding.
The rain returned while many residents were still trying to recover what they could from destroyed homes. That detail matters because it shows how quickly a flooding disaster can become a cycle of loss rather than a single event: leave under one alert, return for belongings, then leave again when the next warning arrives. For the people whose relatives are still missing, the storm has already become a waiting game measured in alerts, rescue updates and unstable ground. The state can count the dead and displaced, but for the families on the scene the emergency is still personal and unresolved.
