Floods and politics...

You might have heard about the floods here in Brazil. It rained a lot around Christmas and a bit into January and many rivers were flooded, which created a lot of problems in many cities. As always it seems like it was mainly reported about how it was in Rio de Janeiro, but it was really bad in many more states. I saw a lot of pictures and clips of flooded towns where the water sometimes was one floor high. Many thousands of people became homeless due to these natural disasters. 

Picture from The New York Times. 

What makes it even worse is that this is almost a regular thing. More or less every year around January, there are floods somewhere in Brazil. The location changes, but the tragedy remains. As an example, the picture above is from 2009. Of course the politicians know about this as well and a lot of money is spent to repair cities. The problem is that very little is done to prevent these floods. There was some minister who received a lot of money last year in order to repair cities and prevent it from happening again. I heard that he did a very good job, but only in his state! Most of the money went to his state and very little to the other states. Almost all the money also went to repairs and very little to prevention work.

Another problem is that there is basically no urban planning. I think I read somewhere that the Ministry of Cities, which should be in charge of monitoring urban planning, was created less than 10 years ago. Therefore, no consideration to these predictable disasters are taken when cities are built or restructured. Instead, as way too often, money talks. This means that when a disaster like this hits, it can hit very hard.

This is an example of one of the problems of Brazil: there is very little long-term planning. Everyone is very relaxed and too many people thinks along the lines of "relax, it will be OK" (which often probably is the same as "what I don't do today, someone else will hopefully do tomorrow").

Another example of this mentality is that about a year and a half ago I heard that they were about to start building a new technology centre here next to the university. I heard several times that it would definitely be ready within a year. Now, 1.5 years later, they actually seem to almost be ready to start the construction work.

I just hope that everything will work out well with the football world cup...