Flooding from torrential rains has claimed at least 50 lives in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, leaving streets submerged and prompting authorities to raise an alarm over potentially deadly mudslides, yesterday.
Eduardo Paes, mayor of the city of Rio de Janeiro, where about half of the fatalities occurred, urged residents to remain indoors and not to venture into the downtown area, where streets were impassable because of the water.
"All the major streets of the city are closed because of the floods," Mr Paes said in a statement.
"Each and every person who attempts to enter them will be at enormous risk," he warned.
In addition to yesterday's dire warnings, local authorities closed schools here to help keep residents off the streets.
In some parts of Rio, abandoned cars were partially submerged, while others were stalled on local roads with motorists still stranded inside.
Flooding also wreaked havoc with air traffic, causing serious airport delays while in some areas of the hilly metropolitan area of some 16 million people floodwaters unleashed mudslides - a recurring scourge, especially in Rio's impoverished hillside favelas, or shantytowns.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized decades of administrative malfeasance which allowed shoddy home construction in high-risk zones of the city's shantytowns.
The Brazilian leader was visiting the city yesterday for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a new health centre and a separate child care facility serving underprivileged residents of the city's slums.
But those events were cancelled because of the rains, which made it nearly impossible to travel from one part of the city to another.
Officials for too long, Lula said, have allowed substandard construction, even on Rio's landslide-prone hills and vowed that his government would work to improve the quality of construction in these areas.
Until the waters subside however, he said, there was little that could be done.
"All we can do is pray to God to hold back the rains a little, so that Rio can return to normal, and so that we can set about fixing the things in the city that need fixing," the Brazilian leader told local radio.
The rains started during Monday's evening rush hour, catching workers heading home for the day off-guard.
The heavy rains in Rio followed equally heavy deluges in Sao Paulo earlier this year after the wettest summer in the region in more than six decades, officials said.
Those killer rainstorms across Sao Paulo state claimed dozens of lives.
Inmet, the national weather service, said the El Nino phenomenon - which warms surface waters in the Pacific Ocean and is linked to rainfall across the region - was to blame for those earlier floods.