Brazil struggles to get aid to vast flooded area

SAO LUIS – Brazilians huddled with livestock in shelters, paddled swollen rivers in search of food and complained that government aid was slow to arrive in a vast region stricken by some of the worst rainfall and flooding in two decades.

Authorities reported at least 33 deaths from drowning and mudslides and said 207 000 people have fled swamped, ramshackle homes. Rain continued to fall across a huge swath stretching from the Amazon jungle to the northeastern Atlantic coast, and meteorologists predicted the bad weather could last for weeks.
Rivers were rising as much as 30 centimetres a day in the hardest hit northern state of Maranhao. The surging torrents wrecked bridges and made it too dangerous for relief workers to take boats onto some waterways.
Television images showed hundreds of people with pets and chickens crowded inside an abandoned hospital-turned shelter with only one working bathroom. Some victims paddled canoes to retrieve belongings from inundated homes, and children said they had no food. Isolated cases of looting were reported in communities cut off by high water.
– Nampa-AP