(Orenburg) Sitting in an inflatable boat, Oksana Altintchiourina holds her cat, “Red”, wrapped in a blue towel, firmly in her arms. She has just gone to her home in the Russian city of Orenburg, where the ground floor is “almost completely flooded”.
“The furniture, the refrigerator, the washing machine, everything is floating,” laments this 38-year-old woman with dark red hair on Saturday.
Major floods have been sweeping several regions of southern Russia, as well as Kazakhstan, for days, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes.
Faced with the emergency, they are forced to leave a large part of their belongings at the mercy of water.
Oksana Altintchiourina says she took the most important documents, passports, invoices or birth certificates. But “only that” was saved, and “nothing else,” she regrets.
“The furniture, the belongings, everything is lost.”
The water of the river, the Urals, also took one of her two cats, which drowned, she says. The second, Redhead, survived by taking refuge in the shelves of a cupboard.
“No one helps us”
Floods are caused by intense rain associated with rising temperatures and increased melting of snow and ice. According to scientists, global warming favors extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation.
In Orenburg, the capital of the region of the same name in the Urals, this has made some neighborhoods unrecognizable.
Only the roofs of the small individual houses protrude in places from brown water, as do the tops of the almost submerged street lamps, which no longer have anything to illuminate.
Under a gray sky, some travel in inflatable boats, negotiating as best they can the small rapids created by the overflow of the river.
A man, who has water up to his shoulders, tries to move forward among the objects drained by the floods, a large headset on his ears and sunglasses on his nose.
PHOTO RUSSIAN EMERGENCIES MINISTRY, PROVIDED BY REUTERS
The town of Orsk
Iskander Rakhmatoulline, a 61-year-old bulldozer operator, prepares a dish for himself and his neighbors.
“A hot meal when you come out of the cold water will be helpful,” he said. “We have to help each other.”
Others vent their anger towards the authorities, whom they blame for not helping them enough.
“All the machines, all the equipment, everything is in the water. Nobody helps us,” says Islam, a 25-year-old fruit seller.
His house, in the suburbs of Orenburg, is almost completely submerged and he struggles with his neighbors to save what can be saved using a boat.
“We rent the boat, for which we pay 5,000 rubles per day,” or around 50 euros, he explains.
A little further away, Lioudmila Borodina, 56, has the feeling of seeing her life’s savings squandered.
“I saved every penny, I denied myself everything, all for the house,” she says, sobs in her voice.
“And now everything is flooded. It’s a nightmare,” says this woman with short blond hair.
She claims to be “scared”, because she fears finding her house “all damp” and that “everything will fall into ruin”.
“And there is no certainty that anyone will help us. »