Russian emergency workers raced against time on Monday to rescue thousands of families made homeless by flash floods in war-torn Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus, where 53 people have so far been confirmed dead.
Emergencies Minister, Sergei Shoigu, said the rescue efforts had been helped by a dramatic improvement in the weather across the region, where 70 villages had been wiped out by flooding after torrential rain.
Chechen residents said the flooding was the worst the region had seen since 1937.
The damage was more widespread than any flood in Russia since the Siberian republic of Yakutia was inundated by melting snow and ice in May 2001.
Shoigu acknowledged the widespread concern in Russia that a two-day deluge had cost the lives of so many civilians after victims’ relatives criticised the federal authorities for responding too slowly and ineffectively to the crisis.
”We could have prevented some of the casualties if the whole system had worked well together, starting with the weather forecasts,” Shoigu told journalists.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy to south Russia, Viktor Kazantsev, lambasted the region’s top officials on Sunday for ”wasting time in undertaking the emergency effort and inaction” in the worst affected areas.
But Kazantsev adopted a less immoderate tone on Monday, telling journalists that the rescue effort was nearing completion, and adding: ”All efforts should now be directed to organising the clearing up of the results of the calamity.”
The latest reports from the emergencies ministry said that 53 people were killed in the weekend flooding.
Thirty-one people died in Stavropol territory, 10 in
Karachayevo-Cherkesia, eight in Krasnodar territory, three in North Ossetia and one in Kabardino-Balkaria, ministry representative Viktor Beltsov told Interfax news agency.
It remained unclear whether around 180 people declared missing in Stavropol on Sunday had been found dead or alive.
On Sunday Stavropol’s deputy police chief Colonel Andrei Aleksa said some 230 Russians were either dead or missing as a result of flash floods that engulfed Chechnya and neighbouring regions of the North Caucasus, driving over 75 000 people from their homes.
The official toll of dead and missing rose relentlessly at the weekend along with the floodwaters in the wake of torrential rain that destroyed houses, roads and bridges.
Around 45 000 homes were flooded with more than 1 200 completely destroyed, the emergencies ministry added.
But Monday morning brought some relief to the residents of Dagestan’s city of Kizlyar, due to be engulfed by raging floods during the night, ITAR-TASS news agency reported.
The city, which had spent Sunday frantically building up earthen dams in a bid to keep the flood at bay, saw waters recede by some 0,7m, putting the anxious residents out of immediate danger.
The republic of Ingushetia was among the worst hit, with its mountainous regions completely cut off from aid as torrential waters swept away all roads, RTR television reported.
In Dagestan, the flood damaged an oil refinery, leaking oil into the Sunzha river which swept the oil slick further out to the Caspian Sea.
The emergencies ministry said earlier at least 52 people were reported dead and in the single region of Stavropol some 180 were missing, presumed dead.
President Putin summoned Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and other top ministers to the Kremlin to discuss the emergency in Chechnya, which threatened to aggravate the suffering of a population already traumatised by war.
With tens of thousands of Chechens marooned in the waterlogged mountains, Putin threw the full might of the Russian government behind the emergency effort.
Russian federal troops have been deployed by Moscow in Chechnya for nearly three years to quell a rebel independence movement.
But the army itself had got into difficulties, especially in the mountains in the south of Chechnya where several military units were trapped by floodwaters.
Another badly-hit region is Dagestan, bordering separatist Chechnya, where one third of the region’s territory was covered with floodwater that had destroyed 400 homes, said Dagestan’s emergencies ministry representative Ali Talboyev.
Electricity and telephone lines have been knocked out and hundreds of hectares of farmland destroyed, he added.
Putin has ordered a commission to be set up to help the region recover from damage estimated at $106-million, Shoigu told reporters on Monday. – Sapa-AFP