Flooding

I'm sure that most have heard about the horrible flooding in Brasil that happened in the middle of January.

We've been asked by a few people how it affected us.

What you may have seen on the news or read online or in a newspaper happened many miles from us. It happened in the state of Rio de Janeiro. We live in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

A day or two after they received so much rain up north we had a day where we got pounded with rain here in our city.

In fact, Benay, Garrett, Giovanni and myself were imprisoned by water for two hours. We were at Garrett's soccer school paying for a tournament that he was going to play in. As soon as we got there it started to rain. Pour really.

When it rains quick and hard for an hour or two our city floods. We have a few low areas and it can flood quickly.

We got stuck in one of the low areas. We stayed in our car for hours - hours because we could not get out of a one block area without flooding our car.

After two hours we finally just decided to blast through one of the flooded streets to try to get home. We had to take some alternate routes to get home but we finally made it.

The next day Freitas sent us some pictures from the city during the flooding. He told me water was about 3 inches from entering his hardware store before the rain stopped and the flooding subsided.

Below are a few of the pictures that Freitas sent.

This is the area around where we were trapped.

This is where we were wanting to go. These pictures were taken two blocks from our house.

It was a bad flood but everything was pretty much back to normal within 4-5 hours after the start of the rain. As you can see from the pictures some cars were damaged and I'm sure, some houses/businesses had some water damage issues as well. We didn't hear of anyone losing their life.

We had nothing to complain about. Nothing.

In Rio, it was a different story.

As of last Sunday there were 856 confirmed deaths.

The mudslides were horrible. If you haven't seen any pictures of the destruction then you can click here and see a slideshow of just how bad things were and are there in Rio state. The size of the rocks that rained down on the houses will amaze you. I can't imagine how horrible some of those deaths were to be crushed by those rocks and buried by the mud.

If you want to read more about it in English then click here.

Please pray for those affected.