Nearly 3 weeks after the city of Porto Alegre suffered from its worst floods in history, over 280,000 people are still living in shelters or in homes of friends and relatives. teleSUR
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00:00 Nearly three weeks after the city of Puerto Alegre suffered from its worst floods in history,
00:05 over 280,000 people are still living in shelters or in homes of friends and relatives.
00:10 Our correspondent Brian Meir has more details.
00:13 In greater Puerto Alegre, home to 3.5 million residents,
00:19 the floodwaters have been going down, reaching 3.9 meters above normal today.
00:25 But huge swaths of the city are still underwater, and other neighborhoods, like Santa Teresinha,
00:31 where I am right now, are surrounded by water on all sides
00:34 and can only be reached by walking through knee-deep water,
00:37 as I saw dozens of people do on my way here today,
00:41 some of them barefoot or in flip-flops, despite the risk of leptospirosis.
00:46 As the cleanup begins, residents are getting more and more angry.
00:50 I've talked to several people who've lost everything they've had.
00:53 Residents in this neighborhood say nobody has arrived yet to offer them any kind of help.
00:57 They want to know when the money that's been pledged by the federal government is going to arrive here,
01:02 and they need to make decisions about whether they want to stay here.
01:05 This is the second time the neighborhood's flooded in the last six months.
01:08 It's very close to the Guaybar River.
01:10 And if the flood contention system continues in the precarious situation that was left in
01:15 through 20 years of right-wing local governments,
01:19 they want to know if it's really going to be safe for them to stay here,
01:22 and if not, where they're going to have to move.
01:25 Currently, there's 280,000 people who are living in shelters in Puerto Alegre
01:31 or in houses of friends and relatives.
01:34 And as they return to their homes and start doing the cleanup, assessing the damage,
01:39 they want to know if they're ever going to receive damages from the criminal behavior
01:44 of a local government that allowed a preventable disaster like this to happen.