Water-Dropping Helicopters Sought as Fire Eats Into Brazil’s Rain Forest

Firefighters dug ditches in a bid to halt raging fires in the northern Amazon on Sunday as officials appealed for help and sorely needed water-dropping helicopters.

“We lost control of this thing a long time ago,” fire brigade Capt. Kleber Gomes Cerquinho said as soldiers on a bulldozer carved a firebreak in the jungle.

Fires set by subsistence farmers in the state of Roraima have burned out of control for two months, destroying a vast swath of savannah near the border with Venezuela.

Officials say 2.2 million acres of farmland have gone up in smoke, while an unusually severe drought has killed about 20,000 head of cattle.

Now the flames are eating into remote rain forest areas that are normally too wet to burn.

A column of fire has pushed at least seven miles into the Portugal-size jungle reservation of the indigenous Yanomami Indians.

Tree stumps smoldered in fields of gray ash. Monkeys, snakes and other creatures went deeper into the forest to flee the flames.

“I think if people [had gotten] organized earlier and not let the situation get so out of hand, we could have avoided this,” said Antonietta di Manso, who lost 10% of her farmland.

Despite its vast forest resources, Brazil has no specialized water-carrying planes or helicopters. Roraima state officials said Friday that they would rent 22 helicopters from a private company in Venezuela.

But a spokeswoman said Sunday that only six helicopters were available and that they would not arrive for three or four days because the needed repairs.

Meteorologists say Roraima would normally be receiving the first showers of the rainy season by now. But the El Nino weather phenomenon has altered the usual patterns and the forecast is for no rain until late April.