Nine hours of intense rain caused a landslide in Baños de Agua Santa, one of the most touristic cities in Ecuador, which is on the border between the Sierra and the Amazon. Hundreds of tons of mud and stick buried homes and covered a large part of the Río Verde sector, a community of 40 families, where eight people have died. “A neighborhood has practically disappeared,” said Marlon Guevara, mayor of Baños, describing how the earth covered the houses. The alert is high and motivated the canton to declare an emergency to deploy machinery and technical equipment to help in the rescue of people and the cleaning of the place. “There are problems throughout the city of Baños,” Guevara added. But the rains affected 34 other cities in 13 provinces in the central and eastern Sierra of the country, and caused rivers to overflow, sinkholes, destroy bridges and landslides. According to the latest report from the authorities, a total of 10 people have died, and nearly 1,300 have been affected by the landslides.
“The amount of water that was recorded was so strong that the flow of the Agoyán dam increased ten times more than normal,” explained Jorge Carrillo, Secretary of Risk Management. The authorities are working on several fronts, removing debris but also displacing people who are in risk areas due to the warning of more rain. “We already have 42 people located in shelters and another 60 are on the way,” says Carrillo. The vast majority are victims whose homes were destroyed by the water and mud, in other cases they have been transferred because their lives are at risk from new floods.
The towns were devastated by the amount of mud and sticks that destroyed everything in their path, including an ambulance that was trapped on the road on the way to Baños. The report counts more than 70 landslides and there are still four rivers that remain overflowing, making it impossible to rescue people in some communities in the Amazon. The emergency extended to the snowy El Altar where 36 tourists were camping and were rescued with hypothermia conditions.
The fragile road network that has not had maintenance in several years has ended up collapsing in some sectors, which complicates the transportation of humanitarian aid, which in some cases has been done by helicopter. “In the province of Tungurahua, in 26 kilometers we have about 18 landslides,” said Roberto Luque, Minister of Transportation and Public Works, and he has also been in charge of the Energy portfolio since April, after separating the minister from the sector due to the crisis. electricity that the Government described as sabotage against its political opponents, in the middle of the popular consultation campaign called by the president. Something that has not been verified until now. The country was in darkness for more than ten hours a day.
![Inhabitants of Baños de Agua Santa in their homes, this Monday.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/TMUF252WQVDQBHKWYXNO7Q45W4.jpg?auth=be9847954bf89d8e02fa39344d1404cd04abb51cec7958eed235384e85c95366&width=414)
What is certain is that the lack of rain was an aggravating factor in the electricity crisis that the country has been going through since October 2023. For several months it did not rain enough in the area where the hydroelectric plants that generate energy for the country are located, and Colombia left to sell electricity to Ecuador, because they were going through a similar crisis. But the new emergency is due to excessive rain, Luque explained, which washed away sediments that complicated the operation of the country’s main hydroelectric plant, Coca Codo Sinclair, located in the Amazon, which had to be turned off on June 17. There alone, 1,500 megawatts were lost and two other hydroelectric plants were disabled, so Ecuadorians were surprised with new electricity outages. This occurs when a week ago Minister Luque announced that the crisis had been overcome and that no more blackouts would occur.
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