"There are people down there for sure. I escaped in time but I heard cries and saw people carried away by the waters," Norberto Vieira, a motorist whose car was still stuck in the Anadia shopping centre car park, told AFP Monday.

Vieira had a lucky escape: just as he was going down the stairs into the car park, one of the town's three rivers broke its banks and swept through the streets, carrying mud and rocks into homes and businesses.

"I heard a great noise, I saw the brown water coming at great speed and I ran for it," he said, puffing nervously on a cigarette.

"My car is still there and if I hadn't abandoned it, I would be another...," said Vieira, who works in an optician office opposite the shopping centre.

The latest figures put the death toll from Saturday's floods at 42.

All day Monday, residents and shopkeepers tried in vain to clean shops and pavements -- they pushed the water into the road with brooms and shovels, only to see it return a few minutes later as another shower fell.

As the rain came down, 38-year-old shopkeeper Jose Manuel took a break and looked across the street at rescuers working the water pump.

"We know there are bodies in there, but the authorities don't want to confirm it yet," he said.

Sniffer dogs brought over from Lisbon on Sunday have detected the smell of corpses, but up to now rescuers have found no signs of anyone trapped in the carpark, a police officer told AFP.

Wearing a caving helmet and wetsuit under his yellow waterproof, the officer said there was no chance of finding anyone alive in the flooded carpark.

An enormous pump, the only one of its kind in Portugal, has sucked a million litres of water and mud an hour for over 30 hours, but still only one level of the two-level car park has been cleared.

At this rate, a rescue official said on condition of anonymity, "it will take another day or two to know what we are going to find in there."

Weather forecasters expect the rain to continue intermittently in Madeira over the next 24 hours before becoming heavier on Wednesday, complicating the rescue effort.

With this in mind, rescuers worked ceaselessly with diggers and earthmovers to try to clear the streets to ensure coming rains could flow away to the sea, which is already the same brown colour as the mud covering Funchal.

earlier related report
Breakneck development blamed for Madeira flood toll
Lisbon (AFP) Feb 22, 2010 - Three decades of breakneck development and rogue urban planning are to blame for the heavy toll from weekend flash floods on Portugal's tourist island of Madeira, environmentalists said Monday.

Portugal was in mourning after torrents of muddy water swamped the mountainous Atlantic island on Saturday, killing 42 people and injuring scores more as the flooding demolished houses and overturned cars.

But for green groups and construction experts, Madeira was left vulnerable to a flood disaster by careless development.

"What happened in Madeira is a textbook example of the dangers of bad urban planning," agreed Ricardo Ribeiro, head of a Portuguese association of public safety technicians.

The Portuguese island, which lies 500 kilometres (300 miles) off the Moroccan coast, has undergone a spectacular modernisation in the past 30 years, largely thanks to European Union funds to channelled to poor, outlying regions.

Tourists from northern Europe flock each year to its capital Funchal, now a small city of 100,000 people boasting waterfront luxury hotels and holiday resorts and state-of-the-art infrastructure.

To cater for the tourism boom, a four-lane highway now runs a ring around the island of 57 by 22 kilometres, while critics says dozens of road tunnels have turned Madeira into a concrete "Swiss cheese."

Green groups have long accused the island's president since 1978, Alberto Joao Jardim, of promoting sprawl with little regard for environmental safety.

For Helder Spinola of the Quercus green group, "heavy rains are not the only explanation for the disaster."

"Planning mistakes made the situation worse," he charged.

Hundreds of buildings have sprung up on land prone to flooding, he says, while the concreting-over of much of Madeira's coast now prevents water from seeping into the soil, making the flood risk worse.

Building roads, high-rise hotels and infrastructure near Madeira's waterways has "waterproofed the soil with concrete and tarmac," he says, a problem particularly acute in the south where most of its 250,000 inhabitants live.

None of the three main rivers that cross Madeira are able to run freely into the surrounding soil, he says.

On Saturday, "these waterways became water cannons sweeping away bridges and buildings," said Portuguese far-left politician Francisco Louca.

Joao Carlos Silva, an opposition Socialist lawmaker in the Madeira regional assembly, also took aim at the "chaotic urbanisation" in and around Funchal, claiming to have repeatedly warned the authorities of the flood risk.

Maderia's regional authorities declined to comment on the accusations, dismissed as "ridiculous" by Funchal's mayor Miguel Albuquerque who said the disaster was caused by "an exceptional weather phenomenon."

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