Between the two extremes of floods and droughts that come with the Solimões stretch of the Amazon River, the town of Anamã has already seen the hospital submerged and the local cemetery relocated twice.
In Anamã, most problems begin and end with water. The town is located deep in the heart of the rainforest, and so the people there are well supplied with fish while still able to pursue small-scale agricultural production. Floods, which can last more than five months, force them to adapt everything, from their own habits to the town’s very architecture. During the dry season, the water grows muddy, the fish die, and access to the large nearby lake and other rural communities becomes all but impossible. Most of the time, water for human consumption is very poor quality: turbid, ferrous, and rank. Here, global warming is not some far-flung hypothesis, whose effects will only be felt in the distant future, but a daily reality.
Starting in mid-December, when an increase in rainfall raises the levels of the Amazon and Purus rivers, Anamã goes underwater. The flooding can last through the month of June. As there’s no sewage system, when the water rises, the homemade outhouses start to overflow. Being on a floodplain, the soil is already saturated, and therefore unable to absorb additional inundations. There’s a spike in snake bites and scorpion stings, as animals begin looking for floating structures as refuge. Caimans invade backyards and gardens.
This is also when outbreaks of diarrhea, fungal infections, and Hepatitis A and B start to occur. Even when people walk through streets that aren’t entirely flooded, the standing water is dirty and contaminated by the fecal coliform bacteria from the outhouses. This is water that drains at an achingly slow rate.
As the waters rise, the river’s flow increases, and human waste and other effluvia are washed away by the current. The water power is weakened by floating houses along the banks of this tiny tributary of the Amazon that work like a sieve, regulating the flow and preventing large tree trunks from entering the town. All vehicles have to be taken by ferry to the town of Manacapuru, ninety kilometers away, and local transportation is done exclusively by canoes and launches. Getting to school or church, policing, garbage collection, shopping, going to bars near the main square … every aspect of life and death involves boats and water.
Motorcycle taxis stop operating—they have yet to develop a canoe-taxi system—and the drivers have to take on other roles, such as fisherman and dockhand, the latter being somewhat less strenuous than otherwise as the high water means it’s no longer necessary to trudge up and down the steep ramp to the river terminal. Some fishermen claim the floods bring greater hauls, but others don’t feel this to be entirely true. There is definitely a drop in commerce, and all agricultural production of manioc, yams, bananas, and watermelons, which are cultivated in the rural areas surrounding the community and usually sold in markets in Anamã and Manaus, is lost.
Periods of flooding and drought are all part of the hydrological cycle of the Amazon River basin. But since 2009, the waters in Anamã have been rising much higher than everbefore. According to residents, the floods generally happen every other year, and there was a record-breaking deluge in 2015. Built on the banks of that same tiny tributary, Anamã’s Hospital Francisco Salles de Moura has to be renovated annually: “Year in and year out, everything here goes underwater,” says Dager Dourado, a general practitioner who lives midway between Anamã and Manaus. For doctors like him, the flooding affects his ability to attend to the local population as well as disrupts the hospital’s operational routine.
In times of flood, the hospital is transferred to something like a floating medical barge. Despite this flexibility, the underlying structure of the main building is growing weaker year after year. Some equipment is fixed to the floor and cannot be transferred, leaving it submerged for months. The walls are showing profound cracks. “The hospital has been dealing with this since 2012,” Dr. Dourado affirms. “A study of the river’s fluctuations over time was done when it was built. They weren’t having floods like these.” When the waters recede, the costs of repair are immense.
The Tancredo Neves state school, which is also located on the banks of the river, has been completely rebuilt and “raised” to withstand the flooding. Luzinei Seixas de Oliveira, the security guard, said that “originally this school was at street level, so any sort of flooding we had would put it underwater. The biggest challenge was the building materials you lose.”
The ways people have adapted their lives are most visible in the town’s architecture. When the first floods occurred in 2005—and they weren’t nearly as severe as those of 2009 and 2015—the locals began hastily to construct houses on stilts, creating intermediary floors or mezzanines in their homes and businesses. As the trend continued in the following years, manydecided to build elevated homes, creating a peculiar architectural style in Anamã where very tall staircases are visible during the dry season. Others, perhaps the more ambitious, decided to turn their houses into floating houses.
Francisco Nunes Bastos, a member of the Party of National Mobilization (PMN), which opposes President Bolsonaro, is the town’s mayor. Known by his nickname, Chico do Belo, he says at one time there was even a proposal to move the entire town from the floodplains further inland to solid ground in the Arixi region near Lake Anamã. But the people voted against it, because access to Arixi is practically impossible during the dry season. Afraid of putting so much work into a ghost town that would never be inhabited, the town abandoned its quixotic plan to abandon itself.
Escalating Floods and Droughts
Over the past decade, six cases of extreme flooding have been recorded in the Amazon region. Since measurements began being taken at the Port of Manaus in 1903, three of the five most severe floods occurred in the decade from 2009. In recent years, there has also been an increase in the amplitude between water levels during the two phases; in other words, the floods are increasingly severe, and the droughts are increasingly dry. Scientists are looking at rising temperatures in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean, resulting from unchecked global warming, as the possible cause of this potentially irreversible change to the Amazon ecosystem.
“With rising temperatures, more water evaporates from the ocean, resulting in more rain in the Amazon area,” explains Marco Oliveira, a geologist and researcher with theGeological Survey of Brazil (CPRM), under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Mines and Energy. He goes on to explain that, because of the Earth’s rotation, the trade winds blow from the Atlantic into the Amazon basin, bringing with them clouds of moisture evaporated from the ocean’s surface. These clouds eventually reach the Andes mountains, essentially a six-thousand-meter-high barricade, and so the moisture rains down over the Amazon.
The rainforest doesn’t create water, but rather “recycles” it, as Marco Oliveira puts it. This has a direct effect on the entire South American ecosystem. As the rainforest breathes and perspires, masses of humid air drift towards south-central parts of Brazil and its neighboring countries, bringing rain to these regions. This complex system, which depends on delicate relationships between the Earth’s rotation, the ocean, geological formations, and vegetation, has been altered most likely by global warming and other impacts human beings have had on nature.
More intense and abundant rainfall in the Amazon is often accompanied by droughts in the southeast. There is still no consensus among researchers on an explanation for the phenomenon, but Oliveira hypothesizes that the deforestation of the Cerrado, a vast tropical savanna region southeast of the Amazon, is generating masses of hot, dry air that are preventing the transfer of moisture to the southeast.
Jochen Schöngart is a German forestry scientist and researcher with the Coordination of Research in Environmental Dynamics team, part of the National Institute for Research in Amazônia (INPA). He analyzes the growth rings of trees in order to trace the chronology and dynamics of water cycles in the Amazon, and he points to other factors that may be aggravatingthese cycles in the rainforest, which is marked by the increasing severity of both floods and droughts: the historical average has been just over ten meters, but on several occasions in recent decades, it has exceeded thirteen. This increase in flood heights is believed to be caused by the simultaneous warming of surface waters in the tropical Atlantic and the cooling of surface waters in the equatorial Pacific.
Low-frequency fluctuations, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which have hot and cold phases lasting from sixty-five to eighty years and forty to sixty years respectively, exert a powerful influence over the distribution of rainfall. The current warm Atlantic phase tends to result in severe droughts in the Amazon, as occurred in 2005 and 2010, whereas the colder Pacific phase lends itself to an increase in the frequency and magnitude of flooding.
Schöngart goes on to explain that changes in climate caused by the phenomena known as El Niño and La Niña also influence rain and water cycles in the Amazon. El Niño results from an unusual warming of cold Pacific waters, primarily off the coasts of Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. The warming creates unusual rains in the region, decreasing the precipitation index in the Amazon and thus increasing rains in southern and southeastern Brazil. La Niña is the reverse: the cold Pacific waters become even colder, resulting in more rain for the Amazon and less for the south and southeast.
For the scientist, this increase in both frequency and magnitude is cause for concern. The year 2012 broke records for flooding in Manaus: “We’re talking about the largest river basin on the planet, representing almost 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. So, yes, it’s something to worry about,”warns Schöngart, who also points to the effects of building hydroelectric plants on these water cycles.
As part of a group of researchers from universities in France, Chile, the United Kingdom, and Peru, Schöngart published a study in the September 2018, issue of the journal Science Advances, revealing an increase in the frequency of severe floods and droughts over the last two to three decades: the largest increase in the 113 years since records began.
The study showed that: “In the first part of the twentieth century, there were severe floods, with water levels exceeding twenty-nine meters (the reference point for declaring a state of emergency in Manaus) approximately every twenty years. Currently, extreme flooding is occurring, on average, every four years.” That’s a five-fold increase over the past century.
Decimated Fish Populations
During the dry season, which runs from July to November along the Solimões stretch of the Amazon River, the phenomena seen and felt by the Amazonian population may be more subtle. Because there is less water in total, there are higher concentrations of fecal bacteria in water used for daily activities. In other words, it may be more contaminated.
Another phenomenon, which I witnessed myself while reporting on this story, is the high rate of mortality for aquatic life in the waterway that connects the town of Anamã to the lake during droughts: hundreds of thousands of fish dying and leaving the water fetid. According to Jânio dos Santos Menezes, president of the local fishermen’s association, “Every year black water flows from the lake, past the town, and into the Solimões River,” killing thousands of fish by asphyxiationas the water “turns,” becoming turbid and muddy. “This year,” the fisherman continues, “since there was such heavy rain, the water also came in from the Solimões.”
As the fish start to suffocate, it becomes easier to catch them. In two days, Jânio estimates that fifteen tons were caught. A single two-man canoe brought in eight hundred kilograms alone. “It happens every year, has been for a long time, but normally the fish are being pushed towards the Solimões. This time, they were trapped in the waterway,” he concludes.
Experts aren’t quite ready to claim a relationship between this phenomenon and a change in hydrological cycles, although this year the unseasonal rains did have unpredictable effects for the fishermen. Water levels in lakes tend to be higher than in the rivers, and as the water drains from the lakes, it brings part of the muddy lakebed with it.
“Silt can kill fish through asphyxiation by clogging their gills, or by a ripple effect in which plants and other primary producers die en masse from a lack of light, and as they decay, they leech oxygen from the water,” explains Cássio Edelstein, an oceanographer and permaculturist. Another possibility has to do with the fact that lake water is “naturally anoxic”—in other words, it tends to have a lower oxygen concentration than the river—and “when the lake water mixes with the river, the oxygen levels are proportionally reduced,” according to Edelstein.
For Giovani Cavalcanti Marinho, a researcher with the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development and an expert in fishery management, this is “a natural phenomenon that happens every year in just about all lowland environments, and which is also known locally as the ‘breaking down’ of thewater.” According to Giovani, this happens when “decomposing organic material is washed down from the lake and starts consuming the oxygen in the water.”
Don’t Drink the Water
“Everyone who visits from somewhere else gets sick,” says nurse Fabrícia Nunes Batalha. Whether it’s the rainy season or the dry season, water quality in Anamã is terrible, and the subject of constant complaints by residents.
“In the morning, the water is just nasty, nasty, nasty. It reeks and it’s full of rust,” complains Nadione Correia Batalha. “The worst thing in this town is the water.”
Here, those who can afford it buy mineral water for drinking, cooking, and even bathing. Those who don’t have such financial resources will occasionally make use of the town’s two main bathing options: the locker room in the Tancredo Neves school, and a spa near the Esmeralda Moura neighborhood, which is one of the areas most affected by the floods.
Luiz Ribeiro dos Santos, a local farmer, says the local well is where he gets the water he needs. “It’s a blessing that sprinkles water across the entire town. If it wasn’t for the well, it would be nearly impossible to get clean water. The pipes and plumbing here are all rusty.”
Many residents will even add a few drops of chlorine to the well water, as even that may be contaminated by runoff from the outhouses. “Around here, not even the best available drinking water is any good,” says Manoel Alves, another farmer. During a flood, the town hall will connect hoses to their faucets and run them outside the building so the local residents can have access to “good” water.
“This is a floodplain,” Dr. Dourado points out. “The river and the surface soil are in a constant state of flux. The entire town could be destroyed by unstable ground.”
For Marco Oliveira, the water conditions can be explained by the geology of this stretch of the river, which is relatively low compared to the heights reached in the Andes Mountains where it originates. “There is a significant amount of clay deposited in the river basin right here, and clay doesn’t retain water,” the geologist explains. According to him, there’s no point digging superficial wells, as these only reach down to muddy waters. Much deeper wells, drilled a kilometer or more into the earth, are needed in order to access the clean waters of the Alter do Chão aquifer, which is found in the substrata across much of Amapá, Pará, and Amazonas.
As Luizinho Lelis de Chagas, a self-employed dockhand who works in Anamã hauling goods at the port, says, “The town is flooded, it’s completely waterlogged, and yet it never stops.”
A sergeant from with city’s Military Police, who asked not to be identified, puts it another way: “Here, we’re on dry land for six months, and underwater for the rest. The town just goes about its business despite the water.” The sergeant went on to tell the story of a friend who died during the rainy season and had to be buried in Manacapuru, because the more they dug in Anamã’s cemetery, the more water appeared. The town has been forced to relocate the cemetery twice already, and a third move will likely be necessary soon.
Oliveira points out that Anamã is the only municipality where, during times of flooding, the Civil Defense doesn’t step in with sandbags and bridgework because the town itself has already adapted. The geologist praises Anamã’s ability to evolve in the face of adversity, but adds that much remains to bedone, specifically when it comes to basic sanitation and waste management, as well as making adjustments to public buildings such as the hospital.
There’s nothing that suggests to researchers that this is a reversible or even temporary situation. Their working hypothesis is that the level of rainfall in the Amazon is intensifying. Climate change across the globe is affecting the populations of small towns in the heart of the Amazon rainforest on a daily basis, and the forecast, according to Marco Oliveira, is that we’ll be seeing many more Anamãs in the years to come.