Water reaches new high in Russian flood zone

In the city of Orenburg, which was severely affected by the floods, the water level in the Ural River rose another nine centimeters overnight, reaching a historic level. “In the morning the height of the Ural Mountains near Orenburg reached 11.71 metres,” Governor Denis Basler said on Telegram today. According to authorities, another 800 homes and 1,800 plots of land have been submerged in the past 24 hours. In total, more than 300 homes were flooded in the city.

According to Basler, the situation is currently still tense, but has stabilized recently. The level did not rise during the past four hours. “We expect that this is the stabilization phase: there will be no further increase, the situation stabilizes, and then the decline begins,” he wrote. Thousands of people were forced to leave their homes due to floods.

The snowy winter led to one of the worst floods in decades in the Orenburg region, 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow. Before the regional capital, the large city of Orsk was hit, as large parts of the old town were submerged by the waters of the Ural Mountains after a dam collapsed.

The 2,400-kilometre-long river, which geographers know as part of the border between Europe and Asia, empties south through Kazakhstan into the Caspian Sea. There is also a flood alert for Kazakhstan: around 100,000 people have been evacuated to safety there.