March 28, 2022

14:03

Luana Carvalho and Bruno Pacheco – Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – The city of Boca do Acre (1,557 kilometers from Manaus) is the fifth city of Amazonas to declare an emergency situation due to the flooding of Acre and Purus rivers. The decree was published last Friday, 25th. Guajará, Ipixuna, Envira and Eirunepé, all in the Calha do Juruá, have also declared a situation of emergency, according to the last report released by the Civil Defense of the State.

According to the Boca do Acre City Hall, 1,700 families have already been affected by the flooding of the rivers, 500 of them in six neighborhoods in the rural area and 1,200 in 92 locations in the countryside. The residents began to be taken, on Friday the 25th, to shelters in the central area of the city. Last year, the city faced one of the biggest floods since 1997, when the Acre River reached its maximum level, 21.04 meters. In 2012, it was 20.54 meters and in 2015, 20.38.

“The flood is causing material, environmental, economic and social damage, affecting hundreds of families, destroying crops and livestock, damage to public roads, health problems in the population, interruption of the urban and rural school calendar,” says an excerpt from the mayor’s decree.

Aggravating

Since March 20, 2022, the municipality has been hit by flooding rivers and, according to the decree available in the Diário Oficial dos Municípios (DOM), the situation is getting worse every day, causing several points of flooding.

The city hall alerts to the forecasts of the Climate Control, Hydrological, and Meteorological agencies, such as the Center for Monitoring and Alert (Cemoa), the Geological Service of Brazil (SGB-CPRM), the Amazon Protection System (Sipam), and the National Agency for Water and Basic Sanitation (ANA), which point to a more aggravating picture of flooding.

Attention or alert

According to the Amazonas Civil Defense, there are three municipalities in the state in a situation of attention, they are: Humaitá, in the Madeira trough; Manacapuru, in the lower Solimões trough and Manaus, in the Rio Negro trough. Another six cities are in an alert situation: Pauini, Lábrea and Canutama, in the Purus trough; Itamarati, in the Juruá trough and Nova Olinda do Norte, in the Madeira trough.

According to the CPRM bulletin number 12, published on March 25th of this year, in all the monitored stations of the main channel, the Negro River has been presenting an intense flooding process, with levels above the expected for the current period of the year. In Manaus, the river is rising at an average rate of 9 centimeters per day, says the report.

Next Thursday, 31, CPRM will release the first edition of 2022 of the traditional “Flood Alert“, broadcasted by CPRM TV on YouTube, at 9am Manaus time and 10am Brasilia time.

The event will be attended by SGB-CPRM Geosciences researcher Luna Gripp, responsible for the Amazon Hydrological Warning System (SAH Amazonas); meteorologists Renato Senna (INPA) and Ricardo Dallarosa (Sipam); and representatives of the Amazonas and Manaus Civil Defenses, respectively: Lieutenant-Colonel Adson Ferreira and Colonel Fernando Paiva Pires.