Brazil searches for dead, for answers as flood toll climbs

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Rescuers raced against time Saturday amid fading hopes of finding survivors of a huge mudslide, with over 400 people now feared dead in some of the worst flooding to swamp Brazil in decades. Rescuers painstakingly pulled bodies from the thick mound of dirt and debris in the Niteroi shantytown of Morro do Bumba late Friday and Saturday, bringing the death toll to 223.

Another 200 people were feared to have been buried alive in the slum, itself precariously perched atop a garbage dump in this city just east of Rio de Janeiro. Some 60 hours after the heaviest rains in half a century unleashed floods and mudslides, rescue workers still were far from having finished the work of recovering bodies from beneath tonnes of rocks, rubble and earth….