Buriticupu, Brazil, May 4 (AFP/APP): A few steps from a cliff edge, Deusimar Batista is hanging clothes to dry in her yard. Near it, a neighbor’s house used to stand on a residential street, but they have all collapsed into the abyss.
Batista is from the city of Buriticupu, in northeastern Brazil, where residents are living a nightmare: the earth beneath them is literally breaking open into enormous craters, which have swallowed streets, houses and even killed people.
“It used to be really nice here,” said Batista, a slight 54-year-old who works as a seamstress.
“But now it’s like this — all destroyed,” she told, motioning to the gorge that now marks the edge of her yard, empty except for some trash at the bottom.
Experts say the rare phenomenon is caused by deforestation and a lack of urban planning in the city of 70,000 people, located in the impoverished state of Maranhao.
Buriticupu, which sits at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, expanded quickly in the 1970s as the site of a housing program for rural workers.
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