Thousands of people in the Russian city of Orsk have been forced to evacuate after a severe dam burst has flooded the area.
Water levels rose by 16ft this morning after floodwater from the Ural river overwhelmed the city, resulting in at least three deaths.
Local authorities said they had evacuated 711 people, including 210 children, from the city of 230,000 people near Russia‘s border with Kazakhstan.
Two of the three districts of Orsk are currently being evacuated as up to 4,000 houses with over 10,000 residents near the city could be inundated by the flooding, officials told Russian state news agency TASS.
Earlier, an emergency was declared across the entire Orenburg region after water levels rose dangerously due to melting ice.
Orsk is the worst-hit area, but Vladimir Putin’s regime is facing ‘critical’ flooding exceeding ‘dangerous’ levels in more than 30 Russian regions, with forecasts of worse to come next week.
‘The protective dam in the Old Town [of Orsk] near Orenburgskaya Street broke through,’ said the city administration.
Video footage shows people and pets carried to safety by boats, with no respite in the flooding for up to two weeks.
Agencies cited the local prosecutor’s office as saying that the dam had been breached due to poor maintenance.
A string of Russian Siberian and Urals mountain provinces and neighbouring parts of Kazakhstan have been inundated by floodwaters in recent days.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said the flooding may be Kazakhstan’s largest natural disaster in terms of scale and impact for 80 years.
‘We must learn all the lessons from these large-scale floods,’ he said.
Heavy earth-moving machinery was brought in a perilous operation to seek to bolster one of two dam ruptures in Orsk, with a 230,000 population, some 1,100 miles east of Moscow.
Orsk mayor Vasily Kozupitsa said: ‘The situation is extraordinary and very difficult.
‘Due to a sharp increase in the water level coming from the upper reaches of the Urals, the dam could not withstand the load….
’The dam was breached near the village of Stroiteley.’
He warned: ‘Today, in a few hours, the water has risen by 4 metres (16ft).’
In Orenburg city, mayor Sergey Salmin warned the situation was critical’ with more than 300 houses already flooded.
‘Don’t wait for the situation to become threatening! Leave! You need to evacuate as quickly as possible,’ he said.
Seasonal floods this year are intensified due to unusual heat and meltwater runoff from snow-covered mountains.
Alerts indicated dangerous levels on the Uver River in Novgorod region, the Protva River in Kaluga region, and the Sudogda River in Vladimir region.
A state of emergency was introduced in five districts of the Chelyabinsk region due to flooding.
Critics say Putin has neglected basic infrastructure such as flood defences as he built hypersonic missiles and engaged in a costly war in Ukraine.
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