Fire fears and uncertainty as Pantanal school evacuates kids

“When fires get closer, the smoke is no longer white. It turns brown, it gets hot, the air dries up, and it becomes hard to breathe.”

Tatiane Zabala is a teacher and educational coordinator at Escola Jatobazinho, a small preschool and elementary school of just over 50 students located on the Paraguay River, in the center-western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, close to the border with Bolivia.

Escola Jatobazinho is situated on the western edge of the Pantanal tropical wetlands, the largest and most biodiverse biome of its kind in the world. And the Pantanal, as The Brazilian Report has covered extensively, is on fire.

On June 7, Ms. Zabala tells The Brazilian Report, Escola Jatobazinho had to evacuate its students before the final week of term, as the blazes encroached ever closer.

The first half of this year has already seen 2,333 fire alerts in the Pantanal, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe). This is 1,628 percent more than in the first six months of 2023. And the peak of this year’s fire season is still months away.

“Fires started upriver about ten days before [the evacuation] and they kept getting closer and closer,” Ms. Zabala says. On June 6, the blaze was already visible on the opposite bank of the Paraguay River, and firefighters warned that if a wind got up, the flames could “jump” to the other side of the water.

“We’re in a windy region here,” Ms. Zabala explains. “We’re so lucky it didn’t spread over to this side of the river.”

That evening, the school kids were treated to a movie night (“to make sure they’d sleep soundly”) and were told they’d be sent home early the next morning.

Escola Jatobazinho is in a remote area of Brazil, where all students arrive via a school boat that travels along the Paraguay River. Some of the children travel very long distances to reach the school, often being taken by horseback and then small boats to the official school boat stop.

Because of this, Escola Jatobazinho runs as a...