The biggest flooding to hit the regions in almost a century caused major rivers in Kazakhstan and Russia to overflow their banks, forcing the Russian city of Orenburg to contend with rising water levels on Thursday.
Over 110,000 people have been displaced from their homes in the Ural Mountains of Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan due to the floodwaters overflowing embankments. The Ural River flows through Kazakhstan and into the Caspian Sea.
The Ural waters rose quickly and far above their capacity to contain, according to Orenburg residents, forcing them to evacuate with only their children, dogs, and a few personal belongings.
“It came very quickly at night,” Taisiya, 71, told Reuters in Orenburg, a city of 550,000 about 1,200 km (750 miles) east of Moscow. “By the time I got ready, I couldn’t get out.”
Whole areas of the city were underwater, and the Ural rose another 32 cm (13 inches) to 10.54 metres (34.6 ft), 124 cm (49 inches) above the level considered by local authorities as safe. Officials warned the river would rise further.
The flooding has struck Russia’s Urals and the northern Kazakhstan worst, though waters are also rising southern parts of Western Siberia, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world, and in some places near the Volga, Europe’s biggest river.
Water levels were also rising in Siberia’s Tomsk, which sits on the Tom River, a tributary of the Ob, and in Kurgan, which straddles the Tobol river.
Residents of Orsk, upstream from Orenburg, were incensed about the way local authorities had handled the Ural’s Friday burst through dam embankments. They demanded more compensation and begged President Vladimir Putin for assistance.
While emergency services worked to deal with rising waters, the Kremlin stated that although Putin was being kept informed on a regular basis about the situation, he currently had no plans to visit the area.
Some Orenburg locals expressed dissatisfaction over the lack of preparations made by municipal authorities for the yearly snowmelt.
“There is a lot of excitement, indignation and strong emotions that I understand and share,” Orenburg Mayor Sergei Salmin said. “The issue of receiving compensation and the procedure for processing payments is one of the main ones.”
Spring flooding is a usual part of life across Russia – which has an area equal to the United States and Australia combined – as the heavy winter snows melt, swelling some of mighty rivers of Russia and Central Asia.
This year, though, a combination of factors triggered unusually severe flooding, according to emergency workers.
They said soils were waterlogged before winter and then was frozen under deep snow falls which melted very fast in rising spring temperatures and heavy rains.
Climate researchers have long warned that rising temperatures could increase the incidence of extreme weather events, and that heavily forested Russia is of major importance in the global climate equation.
In Kurgan, a region which straddles the Tobol river, water levels rose in Zverinogolovkoye beyond the critical 10 metre (33 foot) mark, said Governor Vadim Shumkov who was shown visiting evacuated families.
Kazakhstan has been badly hit.
The emergencies ministry said on Thursday morning that the number of evacuees stood at over 97,000, unchanged from Wednesday, and a state of emergency remained in effect in eight regions of the country.
Emergency workers have removed 8.8 million cubic metres (310 million cubic feet) of water from flooded areas, the ministry said. The Kazakh government also said movement was restricted on hundreds of kilometres of roads in the Aktobe, Akmola, Atyrau, Kostanai, Mangistau and North Kazakhstan regions.
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