
Residents and local governments are making preparations to confront the dreaded “new rains”, which cause landslides that block the channels and ravines that would otherwise help to drain the swollen river. Further aggravating the situation are the tons of liquid and solid waste that flow into the river from homes, businesses and industries in this city of almost five million people.
The “new rains” are “associated with climate change: during most of the 20th century, rains fell little by little, slowly increasing and then diminishing, but now they are short-lived and intense,” explained Nicola Veronico, the manager of environmental affairs at the Metropolitan City Hall of Caracas. “The same amount of rain that used to fall over the course of weeks or a month can now fall in a single morning. It only takes two hours of torrential rain for the Guaire to overflow,” Gabriel D’Andrea, the director of Civil Protection in the populous Caracas municipality of Sucre, told Tierramérica.
...This change, she added, “is not something that is going to happen in the future. It has been happening since the 1970s, and trends indicate that in the decades to come, the temperature will rise, the water supply will decrease, and rain/drought cycles will be altered. The big challenge is to define adaptation strategies and measures.”...
A 1960 flood in Venezuela, public domain
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