PORTUGUESE FLOODS Survivors Dig In Mud

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31539, 29 November 1967, Page 17

PORTUGUESE FLOODS Survivors Dig In Mud

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LOURES (Portugal), Nov. 28. Gaunt-faced women dressed in rags haul odd boots, pieces of furniture and sodden clothing from mounds of mud and rubble littering this flood-battered village.

They have abandoned hope of finding anyone else alive under the ruins. So the survivors dig into the mud for personal belongings left behind by the swirling floodwaters. At least 21 people were swept away or crushed to death when their houses collapsed under a maelstrom of water which smashed the village on Saturday night. Now the stunned people of Loures, nine miles from Lisbon, are counting the cost of Portugal’s worst flood disaster. The Associated Press reported that the floods had taken 316 lives in all of central western Portugal, according to an Interior Ministry statement. The big clean-up went on today as the torrents ebbed away leaving devastation behind.

The once-flourishing farming village of Ponte de Freilas three miles from Lisbon, has been left a giant garbage heap scavenged by vagrants looking for something of value in the wrecked buildings. Bloated carcasses of five dead horses lie rotting beside the mud-spattered marble fountain in the village centre. No one knows what happened to the villagers. A huge artificial lake has appeared in the neighbouring village of Odivelas where 52 people died. Lakes have appeared around several other villages where there was formerly farmland. The floods killed thousands of farm animals, smashed hundreds of rural road bridges and destroyed water and power supplies. Rich farming districts a few miles west of Ponte de Freilas were still under water today and several of the worst-hit villages could be reached only

by paddling through filelds where valuable crops lay ruined below a thick layer of foul-smelling mud. Teams of workmen are toiling around the clock to reopen some main roads. Many of the dirt tracks leading to villages are still impassable. In Lisbon, where troops and civilians joined forces to search for more victims .in the city’s badly shattered poor quarter, there were fears of typhoid.