Rescuers searches for two young girls lost in Bahía Blanca floods

Rescuers continued their search Monday for two little girls, aged one and five, who were swept away by flash floods that killed 16 people in Bahía Blanca.

More than a year's worth of rain fell in a matter of hours Friday in and around the Buenos Aires Province port city, with entire neighbourhoods inundated by the fast-rising waters.

Locals have been particularly shaken by the fate of two little girls who were travelling with their parents by car when their vehicle became marooned in the floods. 

A delivery van driver managed to rescue the two children and their mother and bring them aboard his vehicle but it too filled with water, relatives of the family told local media.

The four climbed onto the roof of the van to try to escape but a flood surge then ripped away the driver and the two girls.

The mother survived, as did the children's father, but the body of the delivery driver was found on Sunday.

The government has ordered three days of national mourning over the disaster, the worst to hit Bahía Blanca in decades.

A hundred people from the remain unaccounted for but the authorities said that they believed most had survived but were out of reach because of damage to the city's cellphone masts or power cuts caused by the floods.

The receding waters revealed catastrophic scenes in several neighbourhoods on Monday of mud-caked streets filled with debris, damaged furniture and cars that had been tossed about by the floods piled up on each other.

Video footage showed overturned cars lying in a gully and residents using brushes to try clear their houses of mud.

Nearly 1,000 people who were evacuated from their homes remain in temporary shelters.

The storm left much of the surrounding coastal area without power and caused an estimated US$400 million in infrastructure damage, according to Bahía Blanca Mayor Federico Susbielles.

Provincial Security Minister Javier Alonso said 23 schools were badly damaged and that parts of Bahía Blanca were still submerged in a metre-and-a-half (five feet) of mud.

“‘There are 269 schools and we need them to reopen as soon as possible. Of the first 100 we surveyed, 32 had no damage, 45 need to be cleaned up and 23 have serious damage and will need to be repaired. All of this takes time,” Alonso said.
Some 200 firefighters have joined the clean-up effort and almost 800 police officers have joined the security effort, amid fears of looting.

President Javier Milei’s national government has authorised emergency reconstruction aid of 10 billion pesos (US$9.2 million).  

Football clubs and other associations launched campaigns to raise money for the victims.

Albiceleste national team captain Lionel Messi offered his condolences on Instagram to the victims' families.

"Much strength to all those who are having a rough time in this difficult moment," he wrote.

Pope Francis, who is still in hospital with pneumonia, said he felt "close to the suffering" of the victims while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also sent her condolences.

Some two million hectares of farmland in the country's agricultural heartland were damaged in the flooding.

Environment official Andrea Dufourg said that the extreme weather event was "a clear example of climate change."

"Unfortunately this will continue to take place... we have no other option than to prepare cities, educate citizens, establish effective early warning systems," said Dufourg, who is director of environmental policy for the nearby city of Ituzaingó.

Bahía Blanca, a city of some 350,000 people,  has suffered past weather-related disasters, including a storm in December 2023 that claimed 13 lives. It caused houses to collapse and provoked widespread infrastructure damage.

As they struggle to get back on their feet, residents are still in shock.

“It started raining around half past three [on Friday]. It was terrible, because the water started coming, all the streets in the city centre were flooded. When it stopped raining for a while, at midday, the brown water started to come,” said local resident Guillermo Busteros, who lives three kilometres from a canal that overflowed.

There are still “no buses, no banks and if you have to buy you have to do it in cash because there is no system ... at night the police patrol with helicopters and searchlights,” said Busteros, whose neighbourhood is still without electricity.

Another local resident, Pamela Pacheco, thinks that “the city is going to have a very hard time recovering.”

– TIMES/AFP