More than 10,000 residential buildings were flooded in the Russian regions of the Urals, the Volga and western Siberia, authorities announced on Monday, facing flooding not seen for decades and which led to thousands of evacuations.
These floods, considered to be of exceptional magnitude, were caused in recent days by heavy rains associated with a rise in temperatures, increased snow melting and the breaking of winter ice covering rivers and rivers. However, no casualties linked to the disaster have yet been announced.
“More than 10,400 residential buildings are flooded,” the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said on Monday.
According to the Kremlin, the governors of the Orenburg, Kurgan and Tyumen regions, as well as the Minister of Emergency Situations, reported on the situation to President Vladimir Putin on Monday morning, who ordered the creation of a special commission.
However, Mr. Putin does not plan to go there, according to his spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, who however expects “the situation to get worse” further.
The majority of evacuations are currently in the Orenburg region, which borders Kazakhstan. More than 6,100 people were evacuated there, including 1,400 children, local authorities said on Monday.
A large part of the region’s second city, Orsk, where there are around 220,000 inhabitants, was flooded after a dike near the swollen Ural River broke on Friday evening. Images published by Russian media show its city center and suburban neighborhoods covered in water, with some houses flooded up to the roof.
According to local authorities, the river level in Orsk fell on Monday morning by nine centimeters and reached 963 cm, but it rose by 16 centimeters in the regional capital, Orenburg (570,000 inhabitants), to 872 cm.
” Unprecedented “
Russia’s official meteorological agency, Rosgidromet, said it expected flooding in Orenburg and its surrounding areas to peak on Wednesday.
The mayor of this city indicated that the region had not experienced floods of this magnitude for decades.
“We haven’t seen so much water in Orenburg for a long time. The record was in 1942 […] after that there were no more floods like that. There, now, it’s unprecedented,” said the city councilor, Sergei Salmin, quoted by Russian media.
On his Telegram account, he said that 1,535 residential buildings had been flooded in the city of Orenburg and called on residents of flooded areas to evacuate “because the situation will get worse in the next two days.”
More than 570 people were also evacuated in the Kurgan region, also bordering Kazakhstan, regional authorities said Monday morning, who fear a flood of the Tobol river.
Several hundred kilometers further north, the large city of Tyumen (800,000 inhabitants), capital of the eponymous region, could also be affected by floods, declared the Deputy Minister of Emergency Situations, Viktor Yatsoutsenko, quoted by the Ria Novosti agency.
Russia is regularly affected by extreme weather phenomena, such as floods or devastating forest fires, often accentuated by the effects of climate change.
Vladimir Putin, whose country is a huge producer of hydrocarbons, does not deny the reality of climate change but has expressed doubts about whether it is the result of human activities.
He assured that adapting Russia and its infrastructure to the challenges of global warming was a priority.
These major floods also affect neighboring Kazakhstan where Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokaïev deplored on Saturday “a natural disaster”, “perhaps the greatest, in terms of scale and consequences, of the last 80 years”.