This city in Brazil is at risk of falling to pieces.
It's crazy when it drops. It's like an earthquake. You can feel it.
Houses and streets are being swallowed up by the earth.
We have to leave our place to go to a place that belongs to someone else. It is difficult.
I used to walk down this street
but I didn't know the ravine was so close.
This is Buriticupu in north east Brazil.
And these are the voçorocas, which means torn land
in the local Tupi-Guarani language.
They're also known as gullies,
an extreme form of erosion found all over the world.
And when they come into contact with cities
that have expanded rapidly with little planning,
it's city versus gully and the gullies might be winning.
My belongings, my house, everything was gone. I only saved my children and my wife.
In 2022 60 people in Alexandre's neighbourhood in Kinshasa
were killed during heavy rain as their homes fell into the gully.
I was on this side where we are. My neighbour was on the other side.
She died with her four children. In 30 or 40 minutes the ravine opened up and all the houses disappeared.
The neighbourhood has become unrecognisable.
In Kinshasa and in Buriticupu the problem is accelerating.
This city has been dealing with erosion for decades, but it's the rate
at which things are changing that's really starting to worry people.
This was a road five years ago, and now it's nothing.
And as the climate's changing and weather is getting more extreme, rain is getting heavier,
the gullies are just going to keep growing
and they're swallowing up the city with them.
Gully erosion is strongly determined mainly by rainfall intensities,
and a lot of predictions indicate
that rainfall intensities will increase 10-15%,
and due to that, erosion rates may double or even triple.
Jose Silveira was nearly 80
and on his way home from a party when he disappeared into the voçoroca.
His son was one of the first on the scene.
When I got here, I saw my father's car the size of a matchbox, down there.
I said: ‘No, my father is not alive’.
And then when I got closer, I saw that my father was in the policeman's lap and was alive.
They got Dad out.
I’d do it all again just as I have for others.
No Dad, there’s no explanation. There are no words.
At least 50 houses here have already been sucked into gullies,
and about 100 more are at risk.
Marisa Cardoso Freire used to live here with her husband and their son, Enzo.
This bench, we made it for him. He liked to sit down.
There were a lot of little birds when we were here. This yard was all clean.
Everything we did was because of him, you know?
Today, Marisa lives in another part of Buriticupu
with her rent paid for by City Hall.
After one incident with Enzo, who's autistic, they had to abandon the house.
He was here in front playing and I was already anxious.
Sometimes I spoke loudly to him, shouted at him to come in.
When we spoke loudly to him, he got angry and ran over there.
He said: 'If you shout at me again, I'll throw myself in the hole'.
So I said: ‘Enzo come back, no Enzo, come back’. Then he came back.
That's when I told my husband that we couldn't stay here any longer.
Because it's too dangerous.
There are two major factors putting Kinshasa and Buriticupu at risk.
The cities are expanding rapidly without plans for how to deal with runoff water.
Brigette Nzengolo who lost her home in Kinshasa
says the problem only started after construction of a highway uphill.
They built very tiny drains. They couldn't cope with the amount of rainwater and they overflowed.
And that overflow was what caused the deaths here.
I've spent 19 years here and nothing like this has ever happened.
And as these cities grow, they cut down the only natural barrier to gullies - trees.
Buriticupu is in the Amazon biome.
And in the 1990s, the timber industry established itself in the region.
In 20 years, most of the city's trees disappeared.
Edelia Dutra Pereira is a geologist and has studied Buriticupu.
When it rains, vegetation reduces the impact of raindrops on the ground.
So, from the moment you remove the vegetation you make the ground bare
and susceptible to the ‘splash effect’,
which is the direct impact of rain on the ground.
In less than five years the advance has been very, very fast.
So what happens in the scenario where these two gullies meet?
We will have a river and in this case, the city will split in half, approximately.
Matthias Vanmaercke and Jean Poesen have found that one million people are
at risk of gully erosion in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.
The impact of humans on both the climate
and the Earth's surface is really unprecedented,
and in this regard, we consider urban gullies a new geohazard.
But the solution - wide-scale engineering works - are expensive.
The basic thing is to reduce the amount of water arriving at a gully,
and so you can do that by increasing
the water absorption in the area that drains.
If you can't do that, you have to try
and to intercept the amount of water, the runoff, before it reaches the gully,
and then to deviate it via, for instance,
a concrete ditch to a place where it cannot cause any harm anymore.
Here there were some houses and there were others on the other side.
With a lack of solutions from his government,
João Batista is trying to sort things out himself.
He's a mechanic and his workshop is on the edge of a gully.
it got risky after it started raining, when the gully started to grow.
A whole house would collapse – boom!
When it fell, the ground shook
and whoever was inside the workshop felt the earthquake and ran out.
He started planting vegetation, bamboo and banana trees
to slow the advance of the gullies.
And it seems to be working.
After I started planting the bamboo, the earth no longer fell on my side.
If I don't take action, the rain when it comes, will take everything.
Now what you need is a little investment, someone who has
the courage to help this big black guy here so he can fix it.
But the problem is much bigger than João.
Stopping gullies after they've formed is expensive.
The federal government in Brazil is considering
a $60 million proposal for structural works in Buriticupu.
This house is gone and my neighbours are dead. And it's really painful for me personally.
It was painful and I still can’t sleep. I think of those people who were like family.
It hurts me a lot.
I feel sad.
When I left, my heart hurt because it's something we fought so hard to achieve, right?
I felt like crying. I don't come back like this. I don't like looking, understand?
If it ends, we have to leave, there's no other way.
It's sad, sad, sad, sad and it hurts inside, right?
We are men who don't like to get too emotional
but only God and I know how much I'm holding back
my feelings to be able to tell you all of this.
This thing has taken away my life, you know?
For sure, this is a man-made disaster in many ways,
but this also has a positive side.
It means also that with proper urban planning and
with proper infrastructure, this can be prevented and stopped.