Civil defense officials said about half of the fatalities occurred in Rio de Janeiro city, where authorities urged residents to remain indoors and not venture downtown, where streets were impassable.

"All the major streets of the city are closed because of the floods," Eduardo Paes, mayor of the city of Rio de Janeiro said.

"Each and every person who attempts to enter them will be at enormous risk."

In addition to Tuesday's dire warnings, local authorities closed schools to help keep residents off streets.

In some parts of the area, abandoned cars were partially submerged, while others were stalled on local roads with motorists still stranded inside.

Civil defense officials said most of the casualties were the result of landslides in the hillside slums that ring the city.

Flooding also wreaked havoc with air traffic, causing serious airport delays while in some areas of the hilly metropolitan area of some 16 million people floodwaters unleashed mudslides -- a recurring scourge, especially in Rio's impoverished favelas, or shantytowns.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized decades of administrative malfeasance which allowed shoddy home construction in high-risk zones of the city's shantytowns.

The Brazilian leader was visiting the city for Tuesday for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a new health center and a separate child care facility serving underprivileged residents of the city's slums.

But those events were canceled because of the rains, which made it nearly impossible to travel from one part of the city to another.

Officials for too long, Lula said, have closed their eyes to substandard construction, even on Rio's landslide-prone hills. Lula vowed that his government would work to improve the quality of construction in these areas.

Until the waters subside however, he said, there was little that could be done.

"All we can do is pray to God to hold back the rains a little, so that Rio can return to normal, and so that we can set about fixing the things in the city that need fixing," the Brazilian leader told local radio.

The rains started during Monday's evening rush hour, catching workers heading home for the day off-guard.

The heavy rains in Rio followed equally heavy deluges in Sao Paulo earlier this year after the wettest summer in the region in more than six decades, officials said.

Those killer rainstorms across Sao Paulo state claimed dozens of lives.

Inmet, the national weather service, said the El Nino phenomenon -- which warms surface waters in the Pacific Ocean and is linked to rainfall across the region -- was to blame for those earlier floods.

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