Sale of stones: Fabiana Alves inspects her craft as her partner loads the car.
After three floods in eight months, the couple had had enough and had moved out of the Brazilian riverside town of Roca Sales.
“We left because … I was afraid. We thought that whatever the clouds, the water or the rain and the flood.
The prosperous city of 12,000 people was one of the worst victims of the historic floods in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, still under water a month after the river first burst its banks.
At least 170 people have died, dozens are missing and more than 600,000 have been displaced by the floods, which experts blame on climate change due to the El Nino weather phenomenon.
Abandoned buildings and empty shops abound in the Roca Shopping Centre. The supermarket has not yet opened after the river flooded the city.
Residents of towns across the Taquari River expect a flood once every ten years. Now they are often hit until they have no time to recover.
Experts agree that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and more severe.
“This is the third time we are rebuilding. People don’t have funds anymore,” Roca sales chief Amilton Fontana told AFP.
“The people here are very hardworking, resilient, but really these three floods shook not only the physical infrastructure, but also the mental stability of the people.”
Fontana wants to move the city center three kilometers (1.86 mi) from its current location to allow residents to “start a new life in a safe place.”
But many, like Fabiana Alves, haven’t seen the charm of the once thriving city, surrounded by soybean and corn farms and a thriving meat industry.
A day after the latest floods, Alves quit his job at a meat company and plans to move with his daughter and partner of 10 years to the northern region of the country’s capital, Porto Alegre, 130km away.
Alves has very little to take with him. Ruined furniture piled up on one side of the rented house, the sofa was barely visible under the mud.
“Also, I lost my memories, pictures of my parents, my daughter’s clothes… It’s a material thing, but I won’t get it back,” she said.
On the main street of the Roca Market, residents are dropped off at the food donation point.
“There is only one truth: everyone is suffering,” said Gelson Moraes Lopez, a 48-year-old waiter who received several plates of hot pasta from volunteers.
Originally from the neighboring country of Parana, Lopez and his wife chose to move to Roca Sale which is attractive with a high standard of living.
Per capita income in the city is 16 percent higher than the Brazilian average of around $10,000, according to official data for 2021.
Moraes Lopez arrived in September 2023, a few days before the first flood. Everything he moved lost.
In November, he “luckily came back” with another flood, which now filled his apartment with a meter of mud.
This is the last straw.
“We will return to Parana,” he told AFP.
Jania Gijeki Silva, 60, and her husband, Joao Carlos Vargas, 61, had no choice but to stay.
“We can’t live any other way,” said Silva, wiping away tears at night.
The retired couple lived on the outskirts of Roca Market when their home was destroyed in the November floods.
They started building a new one near the farm at a higher point that looked safer.
But when the flood came, they had to leave the property unfinished.
“They are now living in a house borrowed by their relatives ‘with no doors and no electricity,'” said Silva, who spent the night.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on Friday described the situation in Rio Grande do Sul as “alarming” and warned of the need to help the population prepare for and survive extreme climate events.
