More than 10,400 residential houses have been flooded across Russia’s western Siberia, the Volga region, and the Central Federal District.
The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations made this known on Monday.
In the severely-hit Orenburg Region, more than 6,100 people have been evacuated from the flooded areas and a total of 33 temporary accommodation centers deployed for 33,000 people, the ministry said.
The Orenburg Regional Government said that the peak of the flood would be expected on April 10, adding that the situation along the Ural River would not be expected to normalize before April 25.
ALSO READ WHD: WHO says Africa recording better health outcomes
TASS news agency, citing information from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, said that more than 18,000 people were in the zone threatened by flooding.
The agency reported that data on April 7-11 pointed to a continuous rise in daily average temperatures, snowmelt and river thawing across Siberia, the Volga region and the Central Federal District.
This is expected to exacerbate the flood risks to low-lying areas and transportation infrastructure.
A flood is an overflow of water (or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of “flowing water”, the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are an area of study of the discipline hydrology and are of significant concern in agriculture, civil engineering and public health.
Human changes to the environment often increase the intensity and frequency of flooding, for example land use changes such as deforestation and removal of wetlands, changes in waterway course or flood controls such as with levees, and larger environmental issues such as climate change and sea level rise.
In particular climate change’s increased rainfall and extreme weather events increases the severity of other causes for flooding, resulting in more intense floods and increased flood risk.
Xinhua
