AFP UK

Thirty-six people are confirmed to have died in the landslide

Hopes were fading Tuesday of finding alive any of the 56 people missing after a devastating landslide swept through a Venezuelan town with 36 confirmed deaths to date.

Neighbors and rescuers — some 3,000 police, soldiers and other professionals — were engaged in the ever-more desperate search among the fast-hardening mud, tree trunks and rocks dumped Saturday on the town of Las Tejerias. 

Rescuers told AFP it would be “difficult” to find any survivors in the town some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the capital Caracas.

“I don’t know whether to scream, I don’t know whether to run… whether to cry,” Nathalie Matos, 34, told AFP of the frustrating wait for news on the fate of her 65-year-old mother, who she had on the phone as the deluge came.  

“She told me: ‘Daughter, I am drowning, the water got in, get me out, get me out… save me!” Matos recounted.

“I tried to call her back, she picked up, but there was just noise.”

A rescue team is at her mother’s mud-filled house.

“The dog gave signs here, in this area that was the living room and the kitchen,” said a firefighter, though all their digging so far had yielded nothing.

“I know she is there,” insisted Mato.  

A few meters away, another team examined a piece of land where a house stood until Saturday, when Las Tejerias became the site of Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.  

Neighbors were helping to reconstruct what would have been the floor plan to get an idea of where to dig.

A civil protection official, who did not have permission to speak in an official capacity, told AFP most victims of the storm died after they were struck by tree trunks, large rocks or other objects swept along by the raging waters, others of hypothermia.  

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that washed away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

According to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, a month’s worth of rain fell in the area in just eight hours.

The government has declared three days of mourning.

– Town ‘will be reborn’ –

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of Hurricane Julia which also claimed at least 26 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage.

Crisis-hit Venezuela is no stranger to seasonal storms, but this was the worst so far this year following historic rain levels that caused dozens of deaths in recent months. 

In 1999, about 10,000 people died in a massive landslide in the northern state of Vargas. 

President Nicolas Maduro visited Las Tejerias on Monday, vowing to rebuild “each and every” home and business destroyed by the freak storm.

“We take with us the pain, the clamor, the despair, the tears of the people, but they must know that Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn,” he said.

According to Rodriguez, 317 homes were “completely destroyed” and 757 damaged by the mudslide. 

The authorities have erected refuge centers in Maracay, the capital of the affected Aragua province, and announced the distribution of 300 tons of food. 

Climate activist Greta Thunberg said it was a 'mistake' for Germany to shut down existing nuclear power plants while ramping up coal usage

Climate activist Greta Thunberg on Tuesday said it was a “mistake” for Germany to shut down existing nuclear power plants while ramping up coal usage to tackle an energy crisis.

Germany has been forced to restart mothballed coal plants after Russia curtailed its energy supplies to the country in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.

Its decision to extend the lifetime of two but not a third nuclear plant beyond their planned shutdown at year’s end has however led to a split within Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.

Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens has come under pressure over his nuclear policy, with some ecologists criticising him for failing to keep to the planned atomic phase-out.

At the same time, Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the liberal Free Democrats is leading the charge in pressing for the third nuclear plant to stay on the grid beyond the end of the year.

Asked about Habeck’s decision in an interview with ARD broadcaster, Thunberg said that “if we have (the nuclear plants) already running, I feel it’s a mistake to close them down” if coal was the alternative.

Lindner immediately took to Twitter to welcome Thunberg’s position.

“In this energy war, everything that creates electricity capacity must be kept on the grid,” he said.

Nuclear power is a hot button topic in Germany’s political landscape. 

Former chancellor Angela Merkel had pushed through Germany’s nuclear exit in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.

The ecologist Greens had lent strong support then to the move, as they have their roots in Germany’s anti-nuclear movement.

Despite huge missile strikes across Ukraine, passenger rail service reopened between Izyum and Kharkiv

As Russia launched a huge wave of missile strikes against Ukrainian cities Monday, defiant rail workers in the east of the country managed to restore a severed rail link.

Angered by a truck bombing that damaged a bridge carrying Russia’s main road and rail link to the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea, Moscow has stepped up strikes on civilian targets.

But, despite the savage bombardment, the passenger rail service between recently-occupied Izyum and Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv restarted after Russia’s February 24 invasion forced a seven-month closure.

“The trains will be running twice a day, every day,” said Izyum railway manager Andrei Gadyatskiy, standing in the rain in front of the boarded up windows of his partially burned station.

Any transport away from Ukraine’s eastern frontline will serve, for some, as a lifeline to the most basic necessities. 

“It will allow them to go to Kharkiv, to use their bank cards,” Gadyatskiy said.

Raisa Starovoytova came to the station on Monday because she could barely believe rumours that the train had returned. 

“I came to find out about the train because I will need to get back to Kharkiv,” she told AFP, relieved to confirm that she would be able to leave later in the week.

The 65-year-old retired teacher had returned to Izyum after the Russian retreat, to see what had happened to her home.

“They took everything they could… mattresses, bedding… I came to take the bedding at least, but it wasn’t there,” she said.

– Former airport shuttle –

There is no electricity to power the electric locomotives that once served the eastern network, and Russian missile attacks still regularly hit the marshalling yards in Kharkiv.

But a Ukrainian DPKr-3 diesel that once shuttled air travellers between the capital Kyiv and Boryspil international airport has been pressed into service, 600 kilometres (360 miles) east of its home.

In the early stages of the war, Izyum came under intense Russian shelling and the invading army occupied the city from early April until its liberation last month by Ukrainian forces.

After the Russian retreat, the discovery of a mass burial site and the corpses of torture victims made Izyum a byword for the alleged atrocities committed under Russian occupation.

Now the town once again has a link to the regional capital, Kharkiv, by the rail line, along with stops in former frontline towns like Savyntsi, Tsyganska and Balakliya along the way.

Mariya Tymofiyenko had not been to Balakliya since the start of the war.

“I’m 73 years old and I still have to ride a bicycle because the buses are not running. It’s too far to walk,” she told AFP, on board the train as it wound its way through low wooded hills under leaden grey skies.

She hopes that Balakliya, where she has relatives, will prove a respite from the ruined town left behind by the Russian occupation of Izyum.

– ‘Tortured, beaten’ –

“I have no hope. If it’s like Izyum, I don’t know — here they broke into my flat, my garage. They stole everything. They ate all my preserves. They took all the tools,” she told AFP, blinking back tears.

“So many people died under the rubble. Apartments were destroyed, the schools. It was terrifying,” she said, wrapped up well against the first damp, chilly days of autumn.

“So many people were tortured, taken away, beaten. One man, my neighbour from one street over, was hanged,” she continued. 

“Yesterday, my granddaughter called me and said, ‘Grandma, I checked on the internet and the train to Balakliya will start again tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘OK, OK I will take it’.”

Gases naturally emitted by New Zealand's 6.2 million cows are among the country's biggest environmental problems

New Zealand on Tuesday unveiled plans to tax the greenhouse gas emissions from farm animals, in a controversial proposal designed to tackle climate change.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the levy would be the first of its kind in the world.

Gases naturally emitted by New Zealand’s 6.2 million cows are among the country’s biggest environmental problems.

The scheme would see farmers pay for gas emissions from their animals, such as methane gas in the farts and burps from cows, and nitrous oxide in the urine of livestock.

Ardern told farmers they should be able to recoup the cost by charging more for climate-friendly products.

She said the “pragmatic proposal” would reduce agricultural emissions while making produce more sustainable by enhancing New Zealand’s “export brand”.

The government hopes to sign off the proposal by next year and the tax could be introduced in just three years’ time.

But with New Zealand going to the polls in the next 15 months, the proposal could cost Ardern rural votes as farmers quickly condemned the plan.

Andrew Hoggard, president of the Federated Farmers lobby group, said the scheme would “rip the guts out of small-town New Zealand”.

He argued the tax could push farmers into growing trees on fields currently used to rear livestock.

Beef + Lamb New Zealand, representing the country’s sheep and cattle farmers, said the plan failed to take into account rural measures already in place to counter greenhouse gases.

“New Zealand farmers have more than 1.4 million hectares of native forest on their land which is absorbing carbon,” said chairman Andrew Morrison.

“It’s only fair this is appropriately recognised in any framework from day one.”

The search continues for dozens of people reported missing after a mudslide ripped through a Venezuelan town

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of dozens of people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 36.

More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed in Las Tejerias, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the capital Caracas, after Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.

“Unfortunately, we have 36 people dead at the moment and 56 people missing,” Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said on Twitter.

And the toll was likely to rise, as a civil protection official warned it would be “difficult” to find more survivors.

“It has been two days already, if they did not die of blows from branches and stones carried by the river, they died of hypothermia,” the official told AFP, on condition of anonymity.

“Las Tejerias will never be the same,” said survivor Isaac Castillo, 45, a merchant in the town of some 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

“We are leaving because recovering from this is impossible.”

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that swept away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

“As much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said, as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of Hurricane Julia, which also claimed at least 26 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage from Panama to Guatemala on Sunday.

Residents of Las Tejerias used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

Firefighters used chainsaws to clear a path through knocked-down trees that had been carried into the town.

But even amid the intense rescue efforts, one firefighter said they are now “guided by the smell” of decomposition.

“Today it smells in several houses,” he said.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

Carmen Melendez, 55, told AFP, “The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” as she waited desperately for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

– Safety on the roof –

But President Nicolas Maduro, who visited the area on Monday, insisted the town would be rebuilt. 

“We take with us the pain, the clamor, the despair, the tears of the people, but they must know that Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn,” he said, vowing to rebuild “each and every one” of the homes and businesses destroyed. 

Rodriguez, his vice president, said 317 homes were “completely destroyed” and 757 damaged by the mudslide.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

Maduro on Sunday decreed three days of national mourning.

Crews of workers with heavy machinery worked to clear the debris-covered roads, while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to a TV antenna on the roof of his home as a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” said the 65-year-old, who barely escaped with his life.

Further afield, at least 26 people died across Central America when storm Julia raced across the region on Sunday.

Five army soldiers on deployment in El Salvador died after a wall collapsed on them as they were seeking shelter from the storm, which killed a total of 10 people in the country and forced some 1,000 people to seek temporary shelter.

In Honduras, Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern town of Brus Laguna, said two people died when Julia capsized a boat. One more person was missing.

And in Guatemala, 14 people died, eight of them in the indigenous municipality of Santa Eulalia, in the west of the country, after their house collapsed due to a landslide. Two people were missing after being swept away by floodwater.

Nicaragua’s Vice President Rosario Murillo said Julia had affected some 7,500 people, flooding 3,000 homes and damaging the roofs of another 2,000.

Julia made landfall Sunday as a Category 1 hurricane and gradually dissipated until it was downgraded to a tropical depression on Monday as it churned toward Mexico.

At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota killed at least 200 people in Central America and caused millions of dollars in losses.

Scientists say climate change warms the surface layers of the oceans, causing more powerful, and wetter, storms and hurricanes.

The search continues for 52 people reported missing after a mudslide ripped through a Venezuelan town

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of dozens of people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 36.

More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed in Las Tejerias, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the capital Caracas, after Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.

“Unfortunately, we have 36 people dead at the moment and 56 people missing,” Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said on Twitter.

“Las Tejerias will never be the same,” said survivor Isaac Castillo, 45, a merchant in the town of some 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

“We are leaving because recovering from this is impossible.”

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that swept away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

“As much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said, as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of Hurricane Julia, which also claimed at least 26 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage from Panama to Guatemala on Sunday.

Residents of Las Tejerias used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

Firefighters used chainsaws to clear a path through knocked-down trees that had been carried into the town.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

Carmen Melendez, 55, told AFP, “The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” as she waited desperately for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

– Safety on the roof –

But President Nicolas Maduro, who visited the area on Monday, insisted the town would be rebuilt. 

“We take with us the pain, the clamor, the despair, the tears of the people, but they must know that Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn,” he said, vowing to rebuild “each and every one” of the homes and businesses destroyed. 

Rodriguez, his vice president, said 317 homes were “completely destroyed” and 757 damaged by the mudslide.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

Maduro on Sunday decreed three days of national mourning.

Crews of workers with heavy machinery worked to clear the debris-covered roads, while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to a TV antenna on the roof of his home as a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” said the 65-year-old, who barely escaped with his life.

Further afield, at least 26 people died  across Central America when storm Julia raced across the region on Sunday.

Five army soldiers on deployment in El Salvador died after a wall collapsed on them as they were seeking shelter from the storm, which killed a total of 10 people in the country and forced some 1,000 people to seek temporary shelter.

In Honduras, Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern town of Brus Laguna, said two people died when Julia capsized a boat. One more person was missing.

And in Guatemala, 14 people died, eight of them in the indigenous municipality of Santa Eulalia, in the west of the country, after their house collapsed due to a landslide. Two people were missing after being swept away by floodwater.

Nicaragua’s Vice President Rosario Murillo said Julia had affected some 7,500 people, flooding 3,000 homes and damaging the roofs of another 2,000.

Julia made landfall Sunday as a Category 1 hurricane and gradually dissipated until it was downgraded to a tropical depression on Monday as it churned toward Mexico.

At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota killed at least 200 people in Central America and caused millions of dollars in losses. 

Scientists say climate change warms the surface layers of the oceans, causing more powerful, and wetter, storms and hurricanes.

Thousands of Bangladeshis will be rendered destitute this year as surging waters and eroding lands reshape the landscape — a phenomenon made worse by climate change

For generations Paban Baroi’s family guarded a temple to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, until Bangladesh’s mighty Padma river wreaked havoc of its own, wiping out the shrine, their home, and 200 other houses in their village.

The 70-year-old and his neighbours are among thousands in the country who will be rendered destitute this year as surging waters and eroding lands reshape the landscape — a phenomenon made worse by climate change.

One day in September, the waterway abruptly changed course and a swathe of the tight-knit community in Baroi’s village vanished as the very land on which it stood was washed away.

“The river current was so powerful,” he told AFP. “Many of us have been living under the open sky for the last few days.”

Baroi’s family were hereditary custodians of the temple in Bangla Bazar, on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, the site of an annual festival that long drew Hindu faithful and friends from its majority-Muslim population.

The ceremonies were staged even through some of the country’s worst catastrophes, including sectarian violence that accompanied the end of the British colonial era and a brutal 1971 independence war that saw an exodus of persecuted Hindus to neighbouring India.

But next year’s festivities could be cancelled for the first time in more than a century — as by then many of the usual participants will have been forced to move away.

“It has been a thriving community of carpenters, fishermen, farmers and traders,” Sohrab Hossain Pir, a councillor for the village, told AFP.

“But now everything is going into the river.”

Bangladesh is a delta country crisscrossed by more than 200 waterways, each connected to the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers that course from the Himalayas and through the South Asian subcontinent.

Periodic flooding that inundates homes, markets and schools has always been a fact of life for the tens of millions of farmers and fishermen who crowd the rivers’ banks — some of the most densely populated areas of the Bangladeshi countryside.

But scientists say climate change has increased the severity and frequency of the phenomenon, with more erratic rainfall causing more cyclones and flash floods.

– ‘Clearly climate change’ –

This year Bangladesh saw record flooding that killed more than 100 people and cut off seven million others, with relief efforts continuing for months.

The impact is expected to worsen significantly in the coming decades, just as rising sea levels threaten to displace tens of millions of people along the low-lying Bangladeshi coastline and inundate its most fertile farmlands with salt water.

Bangladesh is already rated by the UN and civil society groups as one of the countries most affected by extreme weather events since the turn of the century, with entire inland villages wiped from the map.

Around 1,800 hectares (4,500 acres) of land will be eroded by rivers in Bangladesh this year and the homes of at least 10,000 people will disappear, according to the state-funded Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS).

“These erosion events are clearly as a result of climate change,” Ian Fry, the UN special rapporteur on climate change, told reporters when he visited in September.

Residents of disappeared villages often seek a new life in the slums of Dhaka, a sprawling city of 22 million that has doubled in size since the turn of the century on the back of urban migration.

“Many of these people have been displaced by climate change-related reasons,” Fry said in a statement that highlighted endemic child malnutrition, a lack of safe drinking water and high rates of human trafficking. 

– ‘Where will we go?’ –

Bangladesh will present a national plan to help manage increasing natural disasters and extreme weather calamities triggered by climate change at November’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

That includes keeping river erosion to around 1,000 hectares per year — still the size of a large international airport.

At the summit, Dhaka will appeal to leaders of developed nations for urgent funding — it estimates a staggering $230 billion is needed by 2050 to mitigate the impact of climate change on the country.

“It is clear to me the burden of the climate change should not be carried by Bangladesh alone,” said Fry, adding that richer nations with higher levels of historical emissions should help foot the bill.

“For too long, countries have denied their responsibility for the sufferings they have caused,” he said. “They should be paying for this.”

In Bangla Bazar, Baroi and his family were yet to find shelter a week after losing their home, while some of his neighbours took refuge in cowsheds.

Those that still have a roof over their heads fretted over where they will turn when the Padma swallows more land.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Baroi said. “But if the river devours the entire village, what will happen? Where will we go?”

The search continues for 52 people reported missing after a mudslide ripped through a Venezuelan town

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of dozens of people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 36.

More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed in Las Tejerias, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the capital Caracas, after Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.

“Unfortunately, we have 36 people dead at the moment and 56 people missing,” Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said on Twitter.

“Las Tejerias will never be the same,” said survivor Isaac Castillo, 45, a merchant in the town of some 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

“We are leaving because recovering from this is impossible.”

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that swept away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

“As much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said, as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of storm Julia, which also claimed at least 11 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage from Panama to Guatemala on Sunday.

Residents of Las Tejerias used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

Firefighters used chainsaws to clear a path through knocked-down trees that had been carried into the town.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

Carmen Melendez, 55, told AFP, “The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” as she waited desperately for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

– Safety on the roof –

But President Nicolas Maduro, who visited the area on Monday, insisted the town would be rebuilt. 

“We take with us the pain, the clamor, the despair, the tears of the people, but they must know that Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn,” he said, vowing to rebuild “each and every one” of the homes and businesses destroyed. 

Rodriguez, his vice president, said 317 homes were “completely destroyed” and 757 damaged by the mudslide.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

Maduro on Sunday decreed three days of national mourning.

Crews of workers with heavy machinery worked to clear the debris-covered roads, while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to a TV antenna on the roof of his home as a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” said the 65-year-old, who barely escaped with his life.

Further afield, at least 11 people died in Honduras and El Salvador when storm Julia raced across Central America on Sunday.

Five army soldiers on deployment in El Salvador died after a wall collapsed on them as they were seeking shelter from the storm, Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said.

Four other people were reported killed elsewhere in the country, where some 1,000 people have sought temporary shelter.

In Honduras, Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern town of Brus Laguna, said two people died when Julia capsized a boat. One more person was missing.

And in Guatemala, the search was on for five people trapped under the rubble of their collapsed home in an Indigenous village.

Nicaragua’s Vice President Rosario Murillo said Julia had affected some 7,500 people, flooding 3,000 homes and damaging the roofs of another 2,000.

Julia made landfall Sunday as a Category 1 hurricane and gradually dissipated until it was downgraded to a tropical depression on Monday as it churned toward Mexico.

At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota killed at least 200 people in Central America and caused millions of dollars in losses. 

Scientists say climate change warms the surface layers of the oceans, causing more powerful, and wetter, storms and hurricanes.

The search continues for 52 people reported missing after a mudslide ripped through a Venezuelan town

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of dozens of people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 36.

More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed in Las Tejerias some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Caracas after Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.

“Las Tejerias will never be the same,” said survivor Isaac Castillo, 45, a merchant in the town of some 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

“We are leaving because recovering from this is impossible.”

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that swept away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

According to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, “as much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of Tropical Storm Julia, which also claimed at least 11 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage from Panama to Guatemala on Sunday.

Residents of Las Tejerias used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

Carmen Melendez, 55, told AFP, “The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” as she waited desperately for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

– Safety on the roof –

Venezuela’s Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos updated the Las Tejerias death toll from 25 to 36 on Monday, and said 56 people were missing.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

President Nicolas Maduro decreed three days of national mourning.

Crews of workers with heavy machinery worked Monday to clear the debris-covered roads, while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to a TV antenna on the roof of his home as a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” said the 65-year-old, who barely escaped with his life.

According to Rodriguez, 317 homes were destroyed by the storm and 757 damaged.

Further afield, at least 11 people died in Honduras and El Salvador when Tropical Storm Julia raced across Central America on Sunday.

Five army soldiers on deployment in El Salvador died after a wall collapsed on them as they were seeking shelter from the storm, Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said.

Four other people were reported killed elsewhere in the country, where some 1,000 people have sought temporary shelter.

In Honduras, Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern town of Brus Laguna, said two people died when Julia capsized a boat. One more person was missing.

And in Guatemala, the search was on for five people trapped under the rubble of their collapsed home in an Indigenous village.

Nicaragua’s Vice President Rosario Murillo said Julia had affected some 7,500 people, flooding 3,000 homes and damaging the roofs of another 2,000.

Julia was downgraded to a tropical depression on Monday as it continued on its way to Mexico.

At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota killed at least 200 people in Central America and caused millions of dollars in losses. 

Scientists say climate change warms the surface layers of the oceans, causing more powerful, and wetter, storms and hurricanes.

Despite huge missile strikes across Ukraine, passenger rail service reopened between Izyum and Kharkiv

As Russia launched a huge wave of missile strikes against Ukrainian cities Monday, defiant rail workers in the east of the country managed to restore a severed rail link.

Angered by a truck bombing that damaged a bridge carrying Russia’s main road and rail link to the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea, Moscow has stepped up strikes on civilian targets.

But, despite the savage bombardment, the passenger rail service between recently-occupied Izyum and Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv restarted after Russia’s February 24 invasion forced a seven-month closure.

“The trains will be running twice a day, every day,” said Izyum railway manager Andrei Gadyatskiy, standing in the rain in front of the boarded up windows of his partially burned station.

Any transport away from Ukraine’s eastern frontline will serve, for some, as a lifeline to the most basic necessities. 

“It will allow them to go to Kharkiv, to use their bank cards,” Gadyatskiy said.

Raisa Starovoytova came to the station on Monday because she could barely believe rumours that the train had returned. 

“I came to find out about the train because I will need to get back to Kharkiv,” she told AFP, relieved to confirm that she would be able to leave later in the week.

The 65-year-old retired teacher had returned to Izyum after the Russian retreat, to see what had happened to her home.

“They took everything they could… mattresses, bedding… I came to take the bedding at least, but it wasn’t there,” she said.

– Former airport shuttle –

There is no electricity to power the electric locomotives that once served the eastern network, and Russian missile attacks still regularly hit the marshalling yards in Kharkiv.

But a Ukrainian DPKr-3 diesel that once shuttled air travellers between the capital Kyiv and Boryspil international airport has been pressed into service, 600 kilometres (360 miles) east of its home.

In the early stages of the war, Izyum came under intense Russian shelling and the invading army occupied the city from early April until its liberation last month by Ukrainian forces.

After the Russian retreat, the discovery of a mass burial site and the corpses of torture victims made Izyum a byword for the alleged atrocities committed under Russian occupation.

Now the town once again has a link to the regional capital, Kharkiv, by the rail line, along with stops in former frontline towns like Savyntsi, Tsyganska and Balakliya along the way.

Mariya Tymofiyenko had not been to Balakliya since the start of the war.

“I’m 73 years old and I still have to ride a bicycle because the buses are not running. It’s too far to walk,” she told AFP, on board the train as it wound its way through low wooded hills under leaden grey skies.

She hopes that Balakliya, where she has relatives, will prove a respite from the ruined town left behind by the Russian occupation of Izyum.

– ‘Tortured, beaten’ –

“I have no hope. If it’s like Izyum, I don’t know — here they broke into my flat, my garage. They stole everything. They ate all my preserves. They took all the tools,” she told AFP, blinking back tears.

“So many people died under the rubble. Apartments were destroyed, the schools. It was terrifying,” she said, wrapped up well against the first damp, chilly days of autumn.

“So many people were tortured, taken away, beaten. One man, my neighbour from one street over, was hanged,” she continued. 

“Yesterday, my granddaughter called me and said, ‘Grandma, I checked on the internet and the train to Balakliya will start again tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘OK, OK I will take it’.”