*People who are into the joys of informal semilegal living need to bear this sort of thing in mind. Dharavi in Mumbai floods just like this Rio slum floods – for different geographical reasons, but identical political ones: no proper drainage because there's no proper utilities of any kind in the informal slum areas.
*Slums do have a much lighter footprint than most formal city areas. However: you know how "green" these drowned favela guys are? They're REAL green now, because graves have even lighter footprints than urban hovels.
http://brazzilmag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12062:rio-rains-kill-145-great-views-in-favelas-come-with-a-steep-price&catid=84:april-2010
Rio Rains Kill 145: Great Views in Favelas Come with a Steep Price
2010 - April 2010
Written by Isabela Vieira
Thursday, 08 April 2010 04:27
Rio's rain began around 5:00 pm on Monday, April 5. There was an uncommon convergence of meteorological, maritime and metropolitan geographic factors. An unusually strong and late cold front moving up from Argentina ran into a vast area of heavy, moisture-laden clouds that had been pushed inland from an abnormally warm Atlantic Ocean. (((Should come with customary moron disclaimer "cannot be linked to climate change," but ALL contemporary climate is ALWAYS climate-change climate.)))
Although the cold front came in with winds of up to 70 kilometers per hour its progress was stymied by the humid mass of air over the continent so it lingered, dumping more than 280 millimeters of rain in less than 24 hours (that is almost a foot of water! and it is a new record; the previous record was 240 centimeters in January 1966). It all proved to be extremely lethal. The last numbers talk about at least 145 deaths.
There were very rough seas, with two-meter waves coming in from the south and, significantly, two high tides: just before 1:00 am and 7:00 am, with a low tide between them that was insignificantly lower than the high tides. What that meant was little room for runoff - certainly not for the enormous runoff of yesterday's record-breaking rainfall. (...)
The city itself perches on a narrow strip of land. On one side, steep mountains of rock covered with a layer of soil. On the other, the water. Those with means have always lived next to the beautiful beaches.
The poor were pushed higher and higher on the precarious mountainsides where, after heavy rains, the soil gets saturated and then the mud, rocks, trees, houses will roar down like angry bulldozers destroying and burying everything in their paths. Almost all the deaths and injuries in Rio and across the bay in Niterói were caused by mudslides.
Downtown the city clogged up. There was just too much water and it could not get out. Rivers and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon (a Rio postcard site) overflowed, as did the storm sewers. There were so many flood points that for most of Tuesday it was impossible to move around the city.
The mayor and governor closed schools, the business community closed shop and urban transportation came to a halt (subway service was irregular and many bus passengers spent the night in their seats). Airports were closed for much of the day, passengers sent to hotels. Even the Rio-Niterói bridge closed for hours.
Electricity was so erratic throughout the day that the city's main supplier recommended that people avoid using elevators.... ((("Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.")))
(((Why don't they do the sensible thing and move someplace less imperilled? Because nobody does.)))
http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12978
(...)
"The defeat stemmed from the fact that Katrina’s flood did not in any way wipe the slate clean. The historical urban layers in the flooded zones — including land title, property value, commercial investments, social networks and personal attachments — were in fact inscribed deeply and survived easily.
"In the absence of generous and immediate compensation for the loss of prior investments, most flooded homeowners — who understandably worried about tomorrow, not the distant and theoretical future — naturally gravitated to the default option of simply rebuilding in place.
"Local politicians, unable to guarantee an alternative and fearful of retribution at the polls if they proposed one, heard the “keep the footprint” consensus loud and clear and acted accordingly. Anti-shrinkage advocates cinched their victory by pointedly reminding critics that federal levee failure, not Hurricane Katrina itself, caused — or again, failed to prevent — the flooding. What they ignored was the inconvenient geological truths beyond, and beneath, those breached levees..."
(((The architectural takeaway: we could build some really awesome fast, cheap, green, rugged, well-designed favelas nowadays – if it weren't for the endemic corruption and oppression. Which, of course, are the reasons favelas exist in the first place.)))
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/rebuilding-in-haiti/#more-43235
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