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Huge parts of Welsh Patagonia remain devastated by floods caused by the worst rainfall in 40 years.

Residents of the city of Comodoro Rivadavia have faced apocalyptic scenes after 80% of the city was destroyed.

Homes have been swept away or wrecked by mud.

Upturned cars litter the city. Roads have been ripped up by the water leaving gaping cracks in the ground.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Chubut province - and eight of its 16 counties are facing agricultural disaster as a consequence of the weather.

Of the 25,000 Welsh speakers in Argentina, 5,000 are understood to live in the Chubut region.

New Zealander Jeremy Wood lives in the province.

“It has completely devastated the town, people have been killed,” he said.

“There are some very traumatic pictures on the net of streets and cars being washed away.

“The Welsh community is quite small and the government is going to have to help to try and rebuild the town.”

Mudslides have left huge areas isolated and without 21st century communications.

Ricardo Irianni lives in the Chubut Valley.

He said: “Where I live, the main problem was not a flood, it was that the heavy rains that carried a lot of silt and clay in heavy mud from the nude soils of the plateau into the Chubut river.

“As the companies that bring the drinkable water take it directly from this river, this meant that the water could not be purified for many days to the population of the cities.”

These include Dolavon, Trelew, Rawson, Porth Madryn and Gaiman - a cultural centre of the Welsh settlement region known as “Y Wladfa”.

“The stock of purified water was over and, as the system is a little bit old and was not well prepared for this adversity, it took a couple of weeks to recover the level of purification of the water,” Ricardo said.

The situation has now been fixed but people remain “very angry” with the authorities.

“The second and huge problem, catastrophic and devastating, was the heavy rain – more than 400mm in a couple of days – in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, 370km south from here,” Ricardo said.

“That destroyed houses, roads and facilities.

“Here the rain carried mud not to any river, but to the very heart of the city and surroundings.

“It will take months for the city to recover from that, and years for a quite number of families.”

Clare Vaughan is the Welsh language teaching coordinator in Y Wladfa.

She said: “The major damage was in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia to the south-east of the province which received all its year’s rain in seven hours so there was no way the water could soak away.

“There were 4x4s washed away, a hill behind the town had a landslide and lots of precarious houses were destroyed.

“Then about a week later there was really unusually heavy rain over the Paith, or the central steppe, which divided the Andes from the Atlantic coast and what we call Dyffryn Camwy - the Chubut valley.”

At Dique Ameghino a dam was built to prevent floods following those of 1899 and 1901.

“This was built in the 1960s and not only regulates the water coming down from the mountains but also provided electricity for the Valley,” Clare said.

“There was so much water entering the reservoir and the river that the machines that work to make the water fit for human consumption were unable to cope with the sediment and so were turned off.

“People are used to this happening for a day or so.

“But the level of the water remained so high, and then heavy rain to the north caused the Rio Chico to also flood, and there was no way the machines could cope.”

Residents in Gaiman and Trelew have recently got water back after 15 days without.

“In the meantime tankers were going around and you would have go out with your container and fill it,” Clare said.

“The schools have been closed as the Education Ministry could not take the risk from toilets without water et cetera.”

The impact has been worst on the very old and very young.

“Some less than scrupulous shops were charging double the price for bottled water which disappeared as soon as it came in to stock,” Clare said.

“Amazingly only one person died in the whole episode when they were swept away in Comodoro and suffered a heart attack as a result.

“Life is getting back to normal but everyone has been advised to thoroughly clean out their water tanks.

“Activities are slowly getting back to normal with pupils going to school but with their own supply of drinking water.”