Rio de Janeiro on alert and without power for a storm

March 6, 2013
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The Operations Centre of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro said the storm remained for five hours yesterday on alert to various parts of the city and fired emergency alarms in 24 suburbs with a high risk of landslides.

Civil Defense, meanwhile, said three people were hospitalized, without informing the severity of the patients, two of whom were wounded when a canopy fell in the exclusive neighborhood of Tijuca and the other in a house that collapsed in the favela of Vigario Geral.

The basins of Guanabara and Jacarepaguá reached a level three on a scale of one to four, while the Rio-Niteroi bridge, one of the most important that communicates to those two cities in the state of Rio de Janeiro, remained more an hour without electricity.

Some neighborhoods in the south, as Botafogo, were without power, while the Santos Dumont airport and subway stations Afonso Pena, Saens Pena and Sao Francisco Xavier, were closed for the same reason.

At various points in the Avenida Brasil, one of the main arteries of the city, and on other streets floods submerged cars and even buses were stranded in the middle of the makeshift ponds as EFE dispatch.

Weather forecasts indicate Operations Center that thunderstorms will continue today the second largest city in Brazil.