Kazakhstan | The worst floods in decades

(Pokrovka) “I have never seen this in 57 years,” says Raouchan Aoubakirova from her village in northern Kazakhstan, where the steppe of this immense Central Asian country is now under water following the worst floods since decades.

More than two weeks after the start of these natural disasters, around 100,000 people, including a third of children, have already been evacuated, mainly in the western and northern regions bordering Russia, also affected, in the Urals and Siberia.

Entire villages are without electricity, highways are blocked for hundreds of kilometers, bridges have collapsed and more than 4,000 houses are already submerged, according to the Kazakh Ministry of Emergency Situations.

As in Pokrovka, a town of around 1,500 inhabitants in the North Kazakhstan region, where M lives^me Aoubakirova. At 57, she says she just “managed to get the furniture out” in time.

In this village bordered by the Ichim (a river also called Esil in Kazakh), the streets are covered with up to a meter of water in places. Tractors pass, pulling carts carrying refrigerators and washing machines from flooded homes.

Aboard canoes, rescuers knock on the windows of houses to ensure that their inhabitants have left the premises. People who cannot walk are carried, like this old lady who lets herself do so while lamenting, while the authorities have allowed the threat of forced evacuations to save lives.

“The water came very quickly. I stayed up all night and, in the morning, she had already reached the house, we were up to our waists,” Inga Todorovskaya, a 30-year-old social worker, told AFP.

“We were able to evacuate all our dogs and chickens with the help of the town hall,” she continues. In other northern regions, the Ministry of Emergency Situations released images of rescued camels after panicking at the unusual sight of water in the steppe.

If M^me Todorovskaïa was able to save her identity documents and some furniture, she found herself “without housing”, a year and a half after moving in.

” To keep hope ”

Other residents of Pokrovka are more fatalistic.

“We hope to be spared,” Yuri Stepanenko, a bus driver, told AFP, in a sentence that resonates like wishful thinking as the Ishim continues to flood.

The reservoirs can no longer contain the brownish water mixed with patches of snow which overflow everywhere, under the combined effect of melting snow and heavy precipitation.

“And if it doesn’t, well, that’s what it is. What to do ? The most important thing is to keep hope and not panic,” continues Mr. Stepanenko, 61, who is going to evacuate his wife before abandoning his house.

About a hundred kilometers further north, the regional capital Petropavlovsk is now threatened by the wave arriving from Pokrovka. According to authorities’ forecasts, it should reach this city of 220,000 inhabitants this weekend, before a peak expected for around April 22-23.

“We must be ready for the worst-case scenario,” warned Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Roman Skliar, traveling this week in this region of nearly 100,000 square kilometers, an area comparable to that of Portugal or South Korea. South.

To deal with the floods, nearly 25,000 people are mobilized across this country of some 20 million inhabitants: in addition to rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the army, the national guard and the secret services have been requisitioned and volunteers participate in humanitarian operations.

Between Pokrovka and Petropavlovsk, soldiers fill sandbags to reinforce the dikes, amid a ballet of backhoe loaders and dump trucks.

As for the state media, they are taking up the slogan “Strength is in unity”, in the face of a natural disaster that Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokaïev described on Saturday as “perhaps the most serious in recent years”.

Next week, the south and east of Kazakhstan, relatively spared so far, could also find themselves underwater, due to melting snow and precipitation, the Kazakh meteorological agency warned.