A major flood in the southern Urals forced thousands of Russians to evacuate their homes, and residents of Orsk, one of the disaster’s epicenters, took to the streets to criticize the authorities’ response and demand help from President Vladimir Putin.
Extreme seasonal floods hit northern parts of Kazakhstan and Russia’s Orenburg region across the border, where the situation was worsened by the collapse of a dam over the weekend. Kazakh media reported that more than 15,000 people had evacuated since water started rising in the first days of April.
The Ural River, which runs from the Ural Mountains to the Caspian Sea, burst through a dam Friday in Orsk, a city of about 200,000 people. Russia’s main investigative body, the Investigative Committee, opened a criminal case as a result of “violation of safety measures” and “negligence,” citing the dam’s poor maintenance as a cause of the breach.
Another part of the dam burst a day later, further flooding villages in the area. The Orsk oil refinery suspended work Sunday to mitigate ecological risks.
Authorities said that over 6,500 people had been evacuated and that more than 10,000 homes were flooded throughout the region. In the Orenburg region, Russian authorities declared a federal emergency, and the governor, Denis Pasler, said the floods were the worst to hit the area since records began.
The local prosecutor’s office warned residents against staging any demonstrations, saying violators would be given administrative arrests, but several hundred people gathered outside the mayor’s office in Orsk on Monday.
In videos posted by local outlets, protesters are seen chanting “Shame!” and “Putin, help us!” as they urge the local mayor, Vasily Kozupitsa, to resign. They also demanded higher payouts and better assistance to families who were forced out of their homes.
The demonstrations were a rare show of public outrage in Russia, where severe wartime repressions have squashed virtually all public dissent.
Kozupitsa had inspected the dam two days before the breach and had said there was no risk of collapse despite reports of rising water.
“People have no fear that they might be flooded. We remembered the times when Orsk experienced floods without a dam,” Kozupitsa wrote in an April 3 post. “Then the flood drowned houses on Naberezhnaya Street. There is no such threat now.”
At one point, Kozupitsa joined the crowd in hopes of addressing the protesters, who complained that civilians had to procure boats and rescue relatives and livestock on their own. But a loudspeaker provided by the police broke down and Kozupitsa instead invited a group of protesters inside the building for talks with Pasler, the regional governor, local media said.
The Kremlin has warned that water levels in some areas are rising faster than at any time in the past century. Regional authorities said they expected the “peak” of the flood on Tuesday and for the situation to stabilize after April 20.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin had ordered the governors of the two regions east of the river, Tyumen and Kurgan, to prepare for an “expected sharp rise in water levels” and “inevitable” floods. Peskov added that so far Putin doesn’t plan to travel to the flooded regions.
Orenburg officials have estimated the flood damage at about $226 million so far. Authorities have allocated aid payments to affected families — $500 to $1,000 per person for lost property — drawing ire from locals who say this is not enough to compensate for flooded homes.
The dam was designed to withstand water levels no higher than 18 feet, but by Saturday, the river had risen to 31 feet, according to regional authorities. Since the dam was built about a decade ago, it has been subject to several investigations regarding embezzlement and construction mistakes.
In 2014, the Federal Financial Monitoring Service launched an inquiry into the misappropriation of about $1.3 million of state funds by subcontractors building the dam, the Izvestia newspaper reported.
An independent expert involved in the 2014 proceedings, Oleg Dyukarev, told Izvestia the analysis conducted upon the dam’s completion revealed serious issues with the structural integrity and quality of construction.
“During the examination, I identified violations in the amount of actual construction work that was performed,” Dyukarev said. “To put it simply, on paper the work was completed, but in fact it wasn’t.”
In 2020, Rostekhnadzor, the country’s supervisory body in charge of key ecologic and nuclear sites, found 38 maintenance violations, for which it charged the municipality a fine of about $200, Russian news outlet MSK1.ru reported.
Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.