"Everything on the mountain came down," said Suresh Jadhav, a district official, describing how a cascade of mud, rocks and uprooted trees swamped the area.
Barely a week later another disaster would strike: the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which triggered a cascade of mud that buried the entire town of Armero, leaving more than 25,000 people dead.
In Big Sur this year, erosion accelerated by the wet winter knocked out a bridge and sent cascades of mud tumbling onto Highway 1.
The works' slightly grotesque abstract forms evoke animal paws, sluggish cascades of mud, clubfooted octopuses, pieces of fabric plucked up in the middle, phalli rising from lobes of pendulous flesh, clusters of Kilroy-was-here noses, sculptures by Brancusi and Henry Moore, and no end of other things — sometimes all at once.
Authorities said heavy rains contributed to cascades of mud and trees that ripped downward from the steep mountains above, flooding the Liboriana River.
They had since melted, and the ground behind them had given way in a cascade of black mud.
On the mountain side, K-Rails have been anchored in to buffer against cascading flows of mud and debris.
The worst hit area was Teresópolis, a popular hillside tourist town around 60 miles north of Rio where at least 130 residents were buried under cascades of terracotta mud and debris.
Days of heavy rain from the storm, as well as another on the Gulf Coast, have sent rivers of mud cascading through scores of cities and villages on both coasts, leaving an estimated 47 people dead and thousands homeless, one of the highest storm tolls in Mexico in recent years.
Mauricio Martínez, a taxi driver, lost his wife, Lolita; their 14-year-old son, Benjamín; and his wife's two nieces, Emilia, 9, and Gabriela, 6; after a wave of mud cascaded from a hillside onto the family's home in San Martín, a suburb of San Salvador.
Rescue and recovery workers pushed through wind and rain on Saturday to comb through debris a week after a rain-soaked hillside above the north fork of the Stillaguamish River gave way without warning and sent a wall of mud cascading over dozens of homes near the rural Washington town of Oso.
