A series of videos posted on social media shows the exact moment when the rock column crashed into the water. As can be heard in a video shared by President Jair Bolsonaro, from a more distant boat, a group of tourists tried to warn to the boats that were closer to the scene of the accident. “Get out of there,” they repeated.
At least ten people who were traveling in a boat died Saturday in Brazil after the collapse of a cliff in a lake in the interior of the state from Minas Gerais (southeast), confirmed this Sunday the Police.
“Many stones are falling!” Said a woman in another of the videos.
“That block is coming off!” A man commented, already in a desperate tone.
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Then when they noticed another movement in the rock, people started yelling for the boats that were near the canyon to move away. Due to the distance, they were not heard. “That piece over there will fall off! Get out of there! ”, they insisted.
In the last seconds of the video you can see from a new angle the fall of the gigantic stone slab into the water, and the impact it causes, which covers everything. At least one of the boats hit was completely sunk, and others escaped at high speed.
The rock tower suddenly dislodged from the canyon wall and collapsed on at least three pleasure boats, sending a huge wave over Lake Capitolio, in the state of Minas Gerais.
So far the death of “a total of 10 people” has been confirmed, the commissioner of the Civil Police Marcos de Souza Pimenta, one of the organizations investigating the case together with the Firefighters and the Navy, told reporters.
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The victims they were of Brazilian nationality and they were between 14 and 68 years old, according to preliminary investigations.
Two people who had been missing since the accident were found this Sunday by rescuers, who continued to work in Lake Furnas, a tourist region of Minas Gerais.
The 10 deceased they were part of the same family group and friends who were traveling in the boat that suffered the greatest impact during the rockfall, according to firefighters.
During the searches, “bodies and body fragments appeared,” Pimenta explained.
Ramilton Rodrigues, a friend of a young man who died in the accident, was waiting with family members for the bodies to arrive at the forensic institute in Passos, a city about 44 km from the scene of the accident.
My friend “came to the Capitol to celebrate his birthday, he would turn 25 this Sunday, but this fatality occurred,” he told AFP while he waited in the midst of a climate of great anguish.
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More than 30 people were injured, nine of which required hospitalization.
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, on Saturday shared some videos of the tragedy, which he called a “regrettable disaster.”
The causes of the collapse will still be determined, but the intense rains that have fallen in recent days in southeastern Brazil, and especially in Minas Gerais, favored the landslide, firefighters and specialists point out.
The Capitolio region, 300 km from the capital Belo Horizonte, attracts many Brazilian tourists with its rock walls and waterfalls that surround the green waters of Lake Furnas, formed by the hydroelectric dam with the same name.
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“The peculiar nature of that place, all the tourist attraction that the landscape provides, with the reservoir that forms the lake, the waterfalls and waterfalls, is created by the erosion of the relief, a natural and constant process,” he explained to the AFP the geographer Eduardo Bulhoes, from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
Added to this natural erosion are intense rains, that make landslides like the one that occurred on Saturday, called “mass movements”, more likely.
THE NATION AND AFP
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