Rains Fall in Burning Amazon
3/31/98
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Title: Rains Fall in Burning Amazon
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 3/31/98
Byline: William Schomberg
BRASILIA, March 31 (Reuters) - Rain fell on Tuesday in various areas of
Brazil's northern Amazon ravaged by huge savannah and forest fires, putting out
flames in at least one section of jungle, officials said.
``It's raining heavily, it's just what we needed,'' said a spokesman for the
government of the remote Roraima state near the Venezuelan border.
Roraima officials flew over an area inside the massive rainforest reservation
of the Yanomami Indians and reported that fires there had been put out by the
rain, he said.
``In a radius of 12 miles (20 km), where there had been various points of fire,
there was none,'' the spokesman said.
An army colonel said officers in charge of Brazil's biggest ever firefighting
effort were waiting for the weather to improve before flying over a wider area
to see the effect of the rain.
``It's raining so hard here, we can't even take off,'' said Jorge Fraxe by
telephone from the state capital of Boa Vista.
Rain was also falling in the farming region of Apiau, the focal point of the
fires, and in Caracarai, another badly hit area, he said.
But other areas with fires, like the Pacaraima region on the Venezuelan border,
continued to be dry.
A weather forecaster with the National Weather Institute in Brasilia said there
was more rain on the way for Roraima.
``There are conditions for further rain until Friday in areas which have been
burning,'' the forecaster said, adding he expected between 0.4 and 0.6 inches
(10 and 15 millimetres) of rain a day over that period.
Fires set by subsistence farmers in Roraima have spread out of control since
January amid a drought blamed on the El Nino weather phenomenon. Winds have
also hampered the efforts of firefighters to control the hundreds of blazes.
An area the size of Lebanon is believed to have been destroyed, most of it
scrub-covered savannah although flames have advanced into rainforest normally
too humid to burn.
Fires have also been raging in neighboring Venezuela and Guyana, sending smoke
into northern Brazil.
U.N. disaster experts flew to Boa Vista on Tuesday to assess the damage and to
evaluate what kind of foreign aircraft Brazil needs to bolster its
firefighting.
Other U.N. officials are in Brasilia ready to coordinate a search for water-
carrying planes and helicopters among U.N. member nations.
About 1,700 firemen and soldiers are currently involved in the firefighting
operation in Roraima, but they have only four specialized water-carrying
helicopters on loan from Argentina.
With the authorities struggling to contain the fires by conventional means,
much attention has been given to two shamans from the Kaiapo tribe who arrived
on Monday in Boa Vista from the faraway Xingu reservation in Mato Grosso state.
Flown in by the government's Indian Foundation, they performed an ancient rain
ritual on the beach of a dried up river, using creepers and other plants from
the Xingu to call on ``the men up there'' to send down rain.
``The Indians were due to return today to their communities ... but they
insisted that the rain would only leave Boa Vista if they came back to ask for
that to happen in an identical ritual,'' Roraima's government said in a
statement.
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