Bahía Blanca is frantically searching for two girls who went missing during the fierce storm that hit the city on Friday. Delfina and Pilar Hecker, ages 1 and 5, were last seen trying to escape the car they were riding in along with their parents when the storm began. 

The girl’s aunt, a woman named Noelia Haag, told La Nación+ TV channel that the family was trying to board a van nearby when the flood just swept the two vehicles away. While Marina, the mother, was able to wiggle free and escape, the father and the girls were unable to get out. 

“The driver of the van had managed to grab the smallest one when the flood just dragged them away. The van, the driver, the little girl,” Haag said, adding that the car in which the  father and the other girl were in was also swept away by the current. She went on to say that Marina was able to locate her husband Friday night at a fire station, but has no news regarding her daughters or the van’s driver.

Buenos Aires province Government Minister Carlos Bianco announced on Saturday that they are searching for the children in shelters and hospitals, but have not been able to find them yet. 

An ongoing city tragedy

The tragic consequences of the storm that hit the coastal city of Bahía Blanca in the early hours of Friday morning only continue to grow. At the time of writing, the Buenos Aires province government has confirmed that 12 people have died and over 1,200 have been forced to evacuate. Of those 12 bodies, only seven have so far been identified. 

The material devastation is also beginning to come into focus. Pictures on social media and local outlets showed images of houses and highways wrecked by the flood, cars piled up on to each other, and mountains of debris everywhere. And while the water has receded in most places, the streets in the localities of General Daniel Cerri and Ingeniero White still had ankle-deep water due to the fact that the storm coincided with high tide. 

One of the sites hit the hardest was the Dr. José Penna Hospital, which was forced to shut after the neonatology wing had to be evacuated due to flooding. Videos posted online showed nurses wading through knee-deep floodwater carrying babies out of the ward, medical equipment bleeping in the dark around them. City authorities said that the Army assisted in transferring patients to other health care facilities by boat.

Buenos Aires province Governor Axel Kicillof, who visited Penna Hospital on Saturday to assess the damage, has requested the national government a AR$10 billion (around US$10 million) relief fund to help with city reconstruction. A Defense Ministry communiqué said that Security and Defense Ministers Patricia Bullrich and Luis Petri were also in Bahía Blanca on behalf of the national government coordinating relief efforts.  

The storm, which began around 4 a.m., saw over 300 millimeters of rain fall in a little under 12 hours. For the city, that is by far the single-day record of rain in its history. The number smashed Bahia Blanca’s previous record of 167.6mm, which fell on March 17, 1933, closely followed by a 154.9mm storm on February 13, 1975.