Orenburg is next. After Orsk, the flood went to the regional capital

A fire truck, roaring in low gear, makes its way up to the wheel hubs in water along Uralskaya Street in Orenburg.

– Man, move away, the wave is coming! — a police warrant officer calls out from behind.
I manage to jump away from the oncoming water.
– How long have you been standing here?
— They installed it a couple of hours ago.
— Is the water coming?
– Yes, before our eyes. We were given a task: so that none of the civilians should go there. And we and the Ministry of Emergency Situations will take everyone out ourselves.

Oak Reach

Previously, it was believed that Uralskaya Street descends from Gagarin Avenue, one of the central highways of Orenburg, to the Ural River. Now it turns out the other way around – the water of the Urals rises along this street to the city center. So far, only gardening partnerships and individual plots located in the lowlands have been flooded. For example, the day before yesterday Krutoy Lane went down to the horse base. And now it just rests on the water. They managed to move the horses to a safe place.

The flooded piece of road that the fire brigade stormed is not the Urals itself, only its tributary, but it also overflowed its banks and rose about half a meter above the surface of the street. There, further on, is the SNT “Dubovy Ples”, where people remained. They are being evacuated. Relatives and local residents have gathered nearby, waiting for the car.

Other SNTs were also flooded. Formally, these are gardening areas, but in reality they are cottage villages where people have built nice, comfortable houses and live there. Well, or they lived until the water came.

“Yesterday I was the last one to be taken out, first I evacuated everyone, then I went myself,” says Chairman of SNT “Lesorub-2” from the suburbs of Orenburg Vladimir Yumashev. — The administration provided transport, employees were even on duty at night, everything went smoothly. And today my sons-in-law and I took a boat and returned to see what was what. My house is higher up, the water has risen about ten centimeters, but it hasn’t reached us yet. And in the village – some are up to the windows, some are a little lower. There seems to be no one on the roof. Now we’ll take everything we can to the second floor and take food from the refrigerators.”

Over the previous two and a half decades, the water in the Urals not only did not rise that much, but did not even come close to the village, Yumashev assures. And this year such an emergency situation arose.

City TG channels report that a nursery with huskies has been removed from the flood zone, and now volunteers are urgently looking for people willing to foster dogs. The situation with people is very similar: most of the evacuees went to stay with relatives or friends; for those who have nowhere to go in the city, they were deployed for a temporary stay.

According to regional authorities, more than 4 thousand people were evacuated from flooded villages. Travel to 31 settlements is closed, and there are power outages in 9 thousand houses.

At the same time, life in the city goes on as usual: Sunday, some went for groceries, others just for a walk. And in a cafe located a kilometer from the site of the flooding of Uralskaya Street, a master class on watercolor painting is being held. Five ladies of different ages, under the guidance of a mentor, paint quite nice still lifes.

The limit of what’s possible

It is quite calm on the streets closest to the Urals: Pugachevsky, Elektrozavodsky and Obryvisty lanes. There are working TVs in the windows, parked cars, no one is in a hurry to leave, although the Ministry of Emergency Situations regularly sends out notifications to everyone that they need to pack their things and get out to higher and drier places. A fine rain hangs over the city, and no one wants to go out into it again. What if the Urals stop increasing their level and everything will end soon?

“My mother-in-law lived nearby, then they moved me, I stopped by to look at familiar places,” pensioner Viktor Nikolaevich leans on a homemade staff made from a broken thick tree branch: the streets are unpaved and slippery, with such an additional point of support it is more reliable to walk on them. “This hasn’t happened for a long time, of course.” But in 1971, I remember, the monument to Peter the Great – it stands high, on the observation deck – went into the water up to its boots. If it rises like this, it will wash away everyone here.”

We are standing on a narrow staircase between two fences, its lower steps hidden by water. In front of them is a flooded embankment. Only the crossbars of the horizontal bars stick out above the surface – the rest turned out to be at depth.

“From the parapet to the water – at least there was always a human height, or even two, And then … – my interlocutor throws up his hands. “Yes, this hasn’t happened for half a century, and now it’s happening again.”

“This year there was a lot of snow in the Orenburg region and the Urals,” testifies political scientist from Orsk Tatyana Denisova. “And before that there was three years of drought.” And the steppe is like that, it repays all debts. Since there was little water, now there will be a lot of it.”

Catastrophic consequences for Orsk arose due to the fact that the dam protecting the city leaked. They say that during its construction in 2010, construction norms and rules were violated, but the documents were signed and put into operation. There have been recent comments from Gostekhnadzor and representations from the city administration from the prosecutor’s office that the dam needs to be addressed. Now the Investigative Committee will look for answers to these questions. Cases have been opened regarding negligence and violations in construction.

“Orsk was originally laid out in a very low place, because of this it immediately began to flood,” Denisov recalls the story. — Because of this, Orenburg appeared: 300 km downstream and on a high bank. But Orsk, as it was in a dangerous place, remained so. After all, three rivers merge there and there is a lot of water. The Iriklinskoye reservoir, built upstream, smoothed out the situation a little, but it doesn’t give anyone any guarantees.”

Emergency reset

Water collections at Irikla – as the locals call the Iriklin reservoir – have now been reduced by 500 cubic meters of water per second – to 1,670 cubic meters. This is still a lot, but reducing the flow will slow down the development of the emergency. On the same Uralskaya street in Orenburg, they are hastily finishing the dam – according to rumors, it should have been filled during the construction of the microdistrict, now they are urgently trying to complete the work before the wave from Orsk reaches the regional capital. The lower the discharges into the reservoir, the greater the chances that they will have time to complete construction. Although no one can explain why this was not done in a timely manner.

“People say that Irikla flooded everyone, but that’s not true,” Denisova is sure. “They can’t help but dump excess water; if it overflows the dam, it will be completely scary.” Large tributaries fill the reservoir, and they are required to keep its level within the acceptable range. Because of this, hydraulic engineering could not begin releasing water discharges in advance either. This dam was built back in the late 1940s and is still doing its job. Unlike the dam in Orsk, built in 2010.”

Another factor could also be at work, she continues. Any construction in the floodplain is an obstacle to the flow of water. The banks were filled with ravines – the flood began to climb higher, and there were no niches left for it to expand into.

Experts in regulating water levels in rivers honestly admit: once every hundred years, an unprecedented flood can occur anywhere. People have been seeing a prosperous situation for many decades, they begin to build up lowlands, and then big water comes there. In such a situation, even properly constructed hydraulic structures may be powerless.

Meanwhile, in both Orsk and Orenburg, the evacuation continues, and the water continues to rise.