City government conducts emergency drill for rainy days.
Exercise will mobilize 200 professionals this Sunday (6) in critical areas during rainy periods; Praça da Bandeira and Estrada Grajaú-Jacarepaguá are the targets of the operation.
The Rio city hall is promoting the first emergency simulation for heavy rain days on Sunday (6). The exercise, which will mobilize 200 professionals, will take place in Praça da Bandeira, downtown, and on Estrada Grajaú-Jacarepaguá, which connects the north zone to the west zone of the city.
The Director of Operations for the Rio de Janeiro Traffic Engineering Company (CET-Rio), Joaquim Dinis, explained that the chosen regions are historically critical areas during rainy periods, where flooding and landslides occur.
“The training is precisely to test the mobilization capacity, to test the detours, the route, the response time, and the coordination of the city hall's Operations Center in mobilizing the teams. Even though we do simulations in the lab with computer programs, that never represents reality, so we go into the field,” explained Dinis.
Between 9 am and 10 am, access to Praça da Bandeira and the Jacarepaguá-bound lane of Estrada Grajaú-Jacarepaguá is scheduled to be closed.
The simulation will begin 12 hours earlier, at 21 pm on Saturday, at the Operations Center, with the announcement of the first weather bulletin. At 4 am, the city of Rio enters a state of alert and, at 6 am, Mayor Eduardo Paes is contacted by the chief executive of the Operations Center, who informs him of the worsening situation.
Starting at 7 a.m. on Sunday, Paes will be directly monitoring the activity at the Operations Center. At 9 a.m., seven access roads to Praça da Bandeira are scheduled to be closed, reopening at 9:15 a.m. At 9:30 a.m., the Jacarepaguá-bound lane of Estrada Grajaú-Jacarepaguá will be closed, reopening at 9:40 a.m.
The attention stage is the second in a four-level scale used by the Rio de Janeiro city government, and it signifies the possibility of moderate to heavy rain in the coming hours. It precedes the alert stage.
The city government intends to improve and expand the simulations to other parts of the city that traditionally experience flooding on rainy days.