– At least eight tourists were killed on a lake in Brazil when a rock wall fell on their boats. Two people are still missing, the fire department of the state of Minas Gerais announced on Twitter on Sunday.
The search for them continued. Initially, 20 people were considered missing. More than 30 people were injured, four of them were still in hospital on Sunday.
Video images showed how some stones initially fell from a cliff and then a large part of a rock came off. He tipped over on the excursion boats cruising below him on the Lago de Furnas in Capitólio. Passengers on a distant boat tried to warn. “Get out of there!” They call and whistle. “A lot of stones fall down.” Screams can be heard.
According to the fire department, two boats were hit directly by the falling rock face and two more indirectly. The people who were killed were all on the same boat that was named “Jesus”.
Divers were sent to the lake, located around 400 kilometers north of the metropolis of São Paulo, whose gorges with their turquoise-green water are a popular excursion destination in the region. The extensive Furnas reservoir in the Rio Grande is also known as the “Sea of Minas”. The summer holidays are currently in Brazil, so after Christmas and New Year’s Eve there were numerous visitors. The boat trip to the canyons is a classic because of the spectacular nature.
Shock in paradise
“We are in a state of shock,” said the mayor of Capitólio, Cristiano Silva, in a video on Instagram. He expressed his solidarity with the victims. The governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, wrote on Twitter: “We are experiencing the pain of tragedy in our state today, triggered by the heavy rains that detached a rock face on Lake Furnas in Capitólio.”
In the state it had recently rained heavily, as in the northeastern neighboring Bahia. The Brazilian Navy, which participated in the rescue operation, announced an investigation to determine the cause of the accident. In addition, it should be clarified whether the excursion boats were even allowed to be on the lake at the time of the accident, given the weather conditions. The civil defense had warned of heavy rain.
In the media and social networks, a Facebook post made the rounds, with which a user had warned ten years ago of the risk of a rock fall on Lake Furnas. “This stone will fall …”, the doctor Flávio Freitas wrote in March 2012 about a photo that showed a long vertical crack in the rock face above the water.
According to experts, in addition to the heavy rain of the past few days, the region essentially consists of sedimentary rock. Pedro Aihara, spokesman for the Minas Gerais fire department, said on Brazilian television: “The ingress of water in these areas can cause the rock to lose its internal resistance. And such a break can occur.”
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