My name is Sandra, and this is my story of surviving the biggest climate catastrophe that has ever hit the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
I have worked at the seminary here for over twenty years and have been a part of the Baptist mission here for eleven years. My city, Eldorado do Sul, is on a peninsula that is surrounded by the Jacuí and Guaíba Rivers, sitting across from the state capital, Porto Alegre. The entire region is the gateway to the world’s largest freshwater lagoon, which has five rivers flowing into it.
With so much natural water, the region has experienced flooding in the past, but nothing like what happened to us last May when our entire city quickly became submerged underwater in one night. This included my own house, which left eleven people, including me, my mom, my daughter and son-in-law, and my brother and his family, all crammed together in the attic of my neighbor’s house as floodwaters overtook the ground floor and kept rising.
May 1 is always the Labor Day holiday in Brazil, but last year, our city, like so many others in the area, was in a state of emergency. The Guaíba’s banks were starting to overflow, and part of our neighborhood was already getting covered in water. My neighbors who lived closest to the river were already leaving their homes because of the flooding. I do not live that close to the river, and my house has never been flooded, so I was not that worried. But throughout the day, I saw the floodwaters creep closer and closer to my house, and that night I wondered if they were ever going to stop.
The next day, I realized the floodwaters were continuing to rise and would likely flood our home if they did not stop. As a family, we decided we would need to leave our homes in Eldorado do Sul the next day. Our plan was for us all to go to my sister’s house in Sapucaia, about an hour and a half away.
That plan never happened because that very night the floodwaters rose so quickly! When we were ready to leave on the morning of May 3, 2024, all the roads leading in and out of the city were closed due to flooding. I am a full-time caregiver to my elderly mother, so I was trying to find another solution to get my mom to safety. But any solution we came up with that day did not work because the floodwaters were rising from every direction. Our peninsula became an island overnight, and we were all trapped on it.
Later that afternoon, I walked around my neighborhood to see what the situation was. Many of the streets around my house were completely flooded, but because my street was not yet flooded, neighbors were piling onto it in panic. They brought their cars and parked them along the street, and out they came, carrying furniture, televisions, clothes, food, and anything else they could carry to try saving whatever they could from their flooded houses. But what would save them once my street flooded?
By the time night came, things had gotten really bad. We lost our internet. We had no running water, so we had nothing to drink, and the electricity kept flickering on and off. I live in a one-story home, and I did not know if the water would flood my home that night, so my neighbor invited my whole family to come sit in his attic with his family and two other neighbors—eleven people in all. After a few hours, my mom was complaining that she was tired and wanted to go home. I left the attic and saw that our home still looked fine, so I agreed and took her home. She laid down and went to sleep while I went back outside to check on our pets and see how close the water was.
By now it was four the morning, and many of my neighbors were out on the street, trying to get a cellphone signal and keeping an eye on the rising waters. After walking around the neighborhood, I returned home to find my yard had started to flood. I ran to wake up my mom to get her back to my neighbor’s attic. It was so frightening! As we were leaving, I noticed water was pouring up from the ground, flooding the whole area very quickly.
As the sun rose in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, May 4, 2024, I could see and hear my neighbors in despair. As their homes flooded, they were looking for boats or anything that floats. The water was up to their necks as they tried to navigate their way to safety. I was surprised by the current of the water as it swept down my street. Later we learned that a dam on the other side of the city had broken, causing the rapid rise in flooding and the fierce currents.
By now, I was worried about my pets, so my brother and I decided to leave the attic to see if we could rescue them. We clung to trees as we slowly waded our way through the running waters back to my house. I was shocked when I arrived. All our belongings were now floating around the house. They were completely destroyed! We managed to save our cat from a tree and get the dogs and bring them back to our neighbor’s attic. But by now my clothes were soaked, and I had no dry clothes. I was shivering and freezing as I sat in the attic, trying to process what was happening.
Now there were eleven people, eight dogs, and a cat all in a small attic. We had no drinking water, no bathroom, no electricity, and no cell service. We ate a little bit of food our neighbor had brought up earlier; after it was gone, we just waited for things to get better, or worse. As time passed, the floodwaters began to claim the lower floor of the house. When we saw they had already reached the fourth rung of the ladder to the attic, we began to get scared that the water would compromise the structure of the house, making the attic collapse under our weight. We kept praying and asking God for deliverance. Every time someone would get a cell signal, they would send out an SOS to get rescued, but no one ever came. Our whole city was underwater, as were many of the surrounding cities in the region. We were just eleven people among thousands in need of rescue that night. It felt hopeless.
Throughout the night, I was restless and worried. There was not enough room for anyone to lie down or even adjust to stand up. We ran out of food and still had no drinking water. There were three older ladies with us – my mom and two neighbors – and they were extremely cold, weak, and tired. Outside the attic, it kept raining all day and all night.
As the sun came up the next morning, Sunday, May 5, 2024, I saw where there used to be a street outside the house there was now a flowing river. My neighbor said he was going to go home and try to find some bread, so we could have something to eat. We begged him not to go, because the water level was so high, but he insisted. As I was watching him cross the street with water up to his neck, I noticed in the distance a team of people riding toward us on jet skis. I was overcome by so many emotions as I realized we were going to be rescued. The team came up to our house and asked how many people and pets were inside. They said they would first take the oldest three people, as well as the child, my niece. My mom had never ridden a jet ski before; I was worried she was going to fall off, but, thank God, she did not.
The rescue point was in Porto Alegre, on the other side of the river, at a pier called Pontal. When it was my turn to ride there, the scene around me was devastating. We rode past my church, which was flooded, and as we got closer to where the river’s banks used to be, all the houses were completely gone; you couldn’t even see their roofs. The saddest scene were all the animals in the flood waters, struggling to try to save themselves. It was horrible.
When I arrived at the pier, I was met by a team of volunteers. There was a lot of chaos, and I was not sure where my mom was. They took down my name and address. They gave me some food, water, and dry clothes, and then took me to a shelter where I was able to be reunited with my family. We were all so thankful to have been rescued. Even our three dogs were now safe.
We spent two days in the shelter, surrounded by hundreds of people. While there, we were able to get in touch with my sister in Sapucaia and arrange for us to go there like we had once planned. It was a long and hard journey to get there with so many flooded streets. Gasoline was also hard to find. It took us almost five hours to get there. After arriving, we spent twenty days there, waiting for the flood waters in our neighborhood to recede.
Our time in Sapucaia was also difficult. None of the grocery stores were open, and there was no running water in the city. People were desperate to find food and water, and their desperation made me feel like the world was ending. Trucks could not get in to bring supplies. My sister made some rice, sausage, and polenta, and we ate a little of that each day. We couldn’t sleep because we were all having nightmares from the trauma we suffered. We were also worried about our home and our belongings, wondering what was left of them.
The day after we arrived, I woke up very sick. I had a fever of 40° C (104° F). It took all my strength to stand up and walk to the bathroom, where I noticed my legs were covered with big, red spots. I called for my sister. She told me I needed to go to the hospital. When we arrived, the waiting room was full of people with different symptoms caused by being in such dirty flood waters. I spent the next two days there. I am thankful I did not have a parasite, but my skin reacted to the contaminated flood water. After a couple days, I returned home and felt better after taking the medicine.
During the next month, our challenges continued in Sapucaia. The city set up a few water stations where we could fill up with drinking water, and we used water from a swimming pool to wash clothes. The entire month we were there, we lived in these extreme situations. We went out each day to stand in long lines to get drinking water, and then we searched for food to eat. It was several weeks before highways and roads into the region were restored so trucks could bring in supplies of fresh fruits, vegetables, and bottled water.
After almost a month, I got word that the flood waters back home had receded. Most of my family didn’t want to return. Some decided to go to Porto Alegre, while others wanted to go to another state. But my mom insisted we return home. I agreed to help her and told her to stay with my sister while I went back to check on the house. I had heard that because the neighborhood was abandoned, looters were breaking into homes, stealing electrical wires and anything else that was valuable. I wanted to protect my house and get it cleaned so my mom could return to a familiar environment.
What I found when I came home for the first time is hard to describe. The two words that come to mind are “horror” and “destruction.” My house is old, and our belongings were old and simple. But they were our house and our belongings. It was all we had, and it was all destroyed. Everything was covered in black muck – sewage from the storm drains – and it smelled terrible. It took a lot of strength to begin the cleanup process. I remember praying and asking God for strength because, in the beginning, I also had to sleep in this smelly house.
There was also nowhere open to eat or buy groceries in the neighborhood, so we all relied on the volunteers who came daily with prepared food. An army truck also delivered clean mattresses. Cleaning up was very hard. Our items were full of dirty water and very heavy to move. We did not have running water or electricity for many days.
Eventually, I was able to go to my niece’s house nearby, whose second floor had not flooded. I slept there at night and went to my house to clean during the day. The water got turned back on, but we still did not have electricity. I tried to see what could be saved and what needed to be thrown out. Because the water was so contaminated, only non-porous items could be washed with chemicals. Most everything had to be thrown out. We had hardly anything left—just a few dishes and the mattresses that had been donated by the army.
Slowly, donations started to come in from the Baptist mission and others to help us replenish. Everything we had at that time was from donations: from water to food baskets. Beyond belongings, the flood waters also destroyed our wood floors and compromised our walls. The cement was like a sponge that soaked up water. The smell in the house was terrible, and no matter how hard I cleaned, it would not go away; every time I cleaned my brick and cement walls, it would not be long before dirty water would leak out and run down the walls again. Every day I was cleaning those walls. People told me the walls would not dry out fully until the summer, which was many months away, but even a year later, my walls still have not fully dried out.
On June 1, 2024, nearly a month after it all began, we moved back into our home. It was not perfect, but we had what we needed. Because of the donations we received, we had the furniture we needed to move in: new bedding, mattresses, and help with securing some of the structure of our home.
This terrible disaster struck tens of thousands of us across the whole state, but I am grateful to God that through a crammed attic, a team of jet skis, volunteers at the shelter, the Baptist mission, neighbors with a helping hand, and the prayers of so many people across the world, we were never alone in this tragedy. We will always remember that.