Five regions in Russia’s eastern regions declared a state of emergency amid flooding assessed by the national weather centre as the worst in the country’s history.
Floods were heaviest in the Amur region, emergencies minister Vladimir Puchkov said today during a videoconference.
Conditions are set to worsen as Typhoon Utor moves closer to Russia from China, dumping more rain on inundated areas and potentially lifting the Amur River's water level to the highest in more than a century, the centre said on its website.
"The damage is extensive, but the most significant achievement is there have been no casualties. We should not relax," said president Vladimir Putin, who took part in the videoconference along with regional governors and defence, health and emergency officials, from the Black Sea city of Sochi. "There's a lot of work ahead." More than 30cm of rain fell on the Amur, Khabarovsk and Primorye regions between July 1st and August 12th, causing floods there and in the neighbouring Jewish Autonomous Region, according to data from the weather center.
Some areas in the Far East received a year’s rain in the period. “We have never seen such a large-scale flood in our country’s history,” Alexander Frolov, chief forecaster at the center, said today on state television channel Rossiya 24. “The
flood covers territory from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean.”
Television footage showed residents rowing boats past half-submerged houses and military vehicles dumping gravel to counter the floodwater, which has already led to 170,000 people being forced from the Amur, Khabarovsk and Jewish Autonomous regions.
Water has swamped huge swathes of the countryside with 400,000 hectares of agricultural land submerged, causing potential damage of more than two billion roubles (€45 million), Mr Putin’s envoy to the region Viktor Ishaev was quoted as saying.
In 2012, flash floods killed 171 people and damaged more than 4,000 homes in southern Russia’s mountainous Caucasus region.