2024-04-14 13:20:59
The unusually strong spring floods continue to cause great destruction in parts of Russia and Kazakhstan. The Tobol River in southern Siberia rose rapidly on Sunday, threatening to flood parts of the regional capital Kurgan, home to 330,000 residents. “The water is entering the city,” wrote regional governor Vadim Shumkov on his Telegram channel. Many villages upstream were already under water.
Shumkov called on people to immediately leave areas threatened by water. “Take your families, documents, valuables and leave as early as possible!” he wrote. Rescue workers in the Kurgan region managed to pull a washed-away bridge out of the current, the state news agency Tass reported. If the bridge had become wedged, it would have acted as a barrier to raise the water level.
There was a slight relaxation on Sunday in the half-million-strong city of Orenburg on the Ural River, where the flood peaked. According to authorities, a high of 11.87 meters had prevailed there for hours since Saturday – almost 2.5 meters above the mark defined as critical. On Sunday the water level fell for the first time by around five centimeters. Aerial photos showed that the south of the city has turned into a large lake. Of the hundreds of one-story houses, only the roof is sticking out of the water. The most important bridge over the Ural River was impassable; This meant that the districts were cut off from each other.
The administration said the number of evacuees had risen to 16,500 people by Sunday. A more significant decline has already been recorded upstream in the Urals in the city of Orsk, which was the first city to be hit by the floods regarding ten days ago. The regional administration said water had drained from more than 1,500 houses and 1,400 gardens since the previous day.
After a snowy winter, spring flooding is particularly severe in the geographical border area between Europe and Asia. The damage to the flooded houses affects hundreds of thousands of people. On the Russian side, residents complain that the authorities reacted too late to the danger.
The Ural River comes from the mountain range of the same name and flows from Russia to Kazakhstan. Many villages there are also under water. The authorities have so far brought 102,000 people to safety, as the Kazakh embassy in Berlin reported on Saturday, citing the civil defense authorities in Astana. Almost the same number of farm animals were brought to safe places. So far, almost 1,100 tons of humanitarian aid have been brought to the affected regions in northern Kazakhstan.
In view of the emergency and the relief measures for which the Kazakh government has to raise large financial resources, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev canceled the Astana International Forum planned for mid-June. The forum, where representatives from politics and business from all over the world discuss current issues, should meet once more next year, Tokayev wrote on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
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