Floods and landslides kill 30 in Brazil Minas Gerais

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Firefighters carry a body found amid the debris after a landslide caused by heavy rains in the Barrio Parque Jardim Burnier neighbourhood in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, on February 24, 2026. [Pablo Porciuncula/AFP] aljazeera.com

Brazilian military police officers search for victims amid the debris after a landslide caused by heavy rains in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state. [Pablo Porciuncula/AFP] aljazeera.com

Rescue workers carry the body of a victim recovered from debris after a landslide caused by heavy rains in Juiz de Fora. [Pablo Porciuncula/AFP] aljazeera.com

Firefighters search for victims at the site of a landslide in Juiz de Fora. [Pablo Porciuncula/AFP] aljazeera.com

State firefighters said 30 people had died in the cities of Juiz de Fora and Uba, and that more than 200 people had been rescued. [Pablo Porciuncula/AFP] aljazeera.com

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At least 30 people have died in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state after torrential rain triggered flooding and landslides, with 39 still missing and more than 200 rescued, according to AFP reporting carried by Al Jazeera. In Juiz de Fora, a hillside neighbourhood saw 12 houses swept away overnight in what the local fire brigade described as a “massive landslide”. The city’s mayor, Margarida Salomao, declared a state of emergency as about 3,000 residents were forced from their homes.

The damage followed what the mayor’s office called Juiz de Fora’s wettest February on record: 584mm of accumulated rainfall. Classes were suspended across municipal schools and some neighbourhoods were left isolated after at least 20 landslides, Salomao said. The immediate response—search teams, sniffer dogs, temporary shelter, restoration of basic services—will now draw on state capacity that is already routinely mobilised in Brazil’s recurring weather disasters.

These events are often discussed as “extreme” and therefore exceptional, yet the pattern is familiar: dense urban growth pushes housing into steep slopes and floodplains, while enforcement and infrastructure lag behind. When informal neighbourhoods expand in risk zones, the hazards are not abstract; they are converted into night-time death traps when rain arrives and people are asleep. The public sector then inherits the bill—rescue operations, emergency housing, rebuilding—while the underlying land-use decisions remain politically difficult to reverse.

Brazil’s recent record is a series of large-scale clean-ups. In 2024, unprecedented flooding in southern Brazil killed more than 200 people and affected two million, one of the worst disasters in the country’s history. In 2022, a deluge in Petrópolis outside Rio de Janeiro killed 241. Each episode produces promises of “reconstruction” and “risk reduction”, but the practical test is whether rebuilding changes where and how people live—or simply restores the same exposure with better press releases.

In Minas Gerais this week, firefighters were still pulling bodies from mud and rubble while searching for dozens of missing residents. Twelve houses in one Juiz de Fora neighbourhood were simply gone by morning.