Dead and injured after a rock wall came loose and thundered down on excursion boats. How could this happen?
Capitólio – At least seven tourists were killed on a lake in Brazil when a rock wall fell on their boats. Three people are still missing, said the fire department of the state of Minas Gerais on Sunday morning (CET) on Twitter.
More than 30 people were injured, four of whom were still in hospital on Sunday.
A video showed the moment when a large part of a rock loosened and toppled onto the excursion boats cruising below it on the Lago de Furnas in Capitólio. According to the fire department, two boats were hit directly and two more indirectly. All the dead were on a single boat called “Jesus”.
Trigger: heavy rains
Divers were sent to the lake, located around 400 kilometers north of the metropolis of São Paulo, whose canyons are a popular excursion destination in the region. The extensive Furnas reservoir in the Rio Grande is also known as the “Sea of Minas”.
“Today we are experiencing the pain of tragedy in our state, triggered by the heavy rains that detached a rock face on Lake Furnas in Capitólio,” wrote the governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, on Twitter. 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.
Today we are suffering the pain of a tragedy in our state, due to heavy rains, which caused the detachment of a wall of stones in Lake Furnas, in Capitólio. The Government of Minas has been present from the beginning through the Civil Defense and Fire Department.
— Romeu Zema (@RomeuZema) January 8, 2022
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 wall above the water. dpa
