ORENBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Heavy floods continued to hit towns and villages in Russia and Kazakhstan on Wednesday, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate the affected areas.
Floods submerged dozens of settlements in the Ural Mountains, Siberia, the Volga region and parts of Kazakhstan, after major rivers such as the Urals, which flow into the Caspian Sea, collapsed. exceeded their breaking point of 66 centimeters.
In Orenburg, a town of 550,000 inhabitants located around 1,200km east of Moscow, hundreds of houses were flooded and at least 7,700 people evacuated, the Urals having quickly exceeded the critical level of 9.3 meters.
“The level of the Urals is rising,” said Alexei Kudinov, first deputy mayor of Orenburg.
The Kremlin said the worst was yet to come for the Siberian region of Tyumen and the Urals region of Kurgan.
The residents of Orenburg have described these floods as the worst in living memory, and for the Russian authorities, they are the most serious since the beginning recorded. Kazakhstan has evacuated 96,000 people.
In Russia, 10,500 houses were flooded in 37 regions, authorities said.
(Reuters reporting in Orenburg and Orsk, writing by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Lidia Kelly in Lisbon; French version Augustin Turpin, editing by Federica Mileo and Kate Entringer)
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