Date: 7 April 2010

I have reported the torrential rain we’ve been experiencing. I thought it might be normal. It isn’t.  This morning a bucket I’d left on deck yesterday was full to the brim. Not a glass – a bucket. Transpose this amount of rain to an entire mountainside and the consequences have been horrendous. In the slums around Rio, less than 60 miles away, there have been landslides which have taken hundreds of houses with them. More than a hundred known dead so far. Thousands homeless. And the rain, whilst less torrential than the last 48 hours, is forecast to continues for another three days at least. Tens of thousand further houses are in imminent risk. These are the worst conditions in more than 50 years. A state of emergency has been declared in the city of Rio and a three-day period of mourning has started. See the BBC link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8607518.stm

It’s sobering to think that the fun-loving city which we were enjoying so much just 10 days ago, and which is just down the road, is now in a state of chaos and suffering such tragedy. The reason those people affected by this tragedy lived in the slums in the first place was because they had very little. Now they have nothing. My thoughts are with them.