Helicopter to Deliver Supplies in Brazil

By PAULO WINTERSTEIN

SAO PAULO, Brazil – Authorities are sending emergency workers by helicopter to deliver food, medicine and fuel to tens of thousands of families stranded in the Amazon River basin by a record drought that has made river travel impossible in some areas.

The 32,000 stranded families rely on rivers to receive supplies, but the water levels are too low for boat traffic because the area in western Brazil is suffering its worst drought in 60 years, said Hiel Levy, the spokesman for Amazonas state’s government. The state government is sending 350,000 workers to deliver the aid, starting Thursday.

Some cities have been isolated for more than three weeks, but officials didn’t give more specific figures.

Amazonas Gov. Carlos Eduardo de Souza Braga was cautiously optimistic that rains already reported in western Brazil will raise water levels soon. However, scientists say it could take at least a month for the rivers to return to normal levels.

“We already have reports of increasing water levels in some rivers of the state,” Levy quoted the governor as saying, adding that it could take at least two weeks before they become navigable again.

Army troops and state civil defense will be sent to isolated communities to dig wells and deliver drinking water because thousands of fish killed by the drought have made the water in rivers undrinkable, a government statement said.

Malaria cases also have increased in some towns, prompting the government to send medicine and pesticides, Levy said.

Carlos Nobre, a senior researcher with the Brazil’s National Space Sciences Institute and a former director of the institute’s Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies, also said the rivers will likely take more than a month to begin returning to normal.

“The rains have already returned, but the rivers will only begin to fill up in the middle of November,” Nobre said by phone.

The prolonged drought has affected all of the Amazon jungle’s rivers, with many of them reaching the lowest levels ever recorded, Nobre said.

Last week the Solimoes River, one of the largest branches of the Amazon, fell to just 5 feet, more than 36 feet below its normal level, according to the geological service. The four cities that were declared disaster areas last week are located along the Solimoes.

Navigation is still possible on deep rivers like the 4,000-mile-long Amazon, the world’s biggest river by volume. But smaller rivers that serve as the only means of transport for more than 900 river-dwelling communities have been turned into tiny streams or dried out completely, Nobre said.

Dry spells in the Amazon are regular occurrences, but global warming may have contributed to the severity of this year’s drought, Nobre said.

The cyclical rise and fall of water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean can affect the quantity of rainfall in the jungle, Nobre said. Warmer air temperatures this year, together with warmer water in the Atlantic, may have contributed to the severity of this drought, he said.

The common practice of using fires to clear land of forests and brush can aggravate the dry spell, but there is no evidence that it caused the drought, Nobre said.