Since the end of March, large regions of Russia and Kazakhstan have been devastated by the most severe flooding in decades. In Kazakhstan, flooding is, according to President Tokayev, at its worst in over 80 years. As of April 10, a state of emergency has been declared in ten of Kazakhstan’s seventeen provinces.
At least 3,400 residential houses have been flooded, 2680 of them in Kulsary, a small town that is the center of the Zhyloy district on the territory of which the super-giant Tengiz oil and gas field is located, alone. In the meantime, 70% of Kulsary is underwater due to flooding. According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as of April 9, a total of 96,500 people have been evacuated, 35,000, including 7,239 children, of them from Kulsary alone.
As predicted by the experts, the worst is yet to come as flooding intensifies. Upstream on the Ural, which flows into Kazakhstan, floodwaters have already flooded over 14 thousand homes in the Orenburg province of Russia. The big water is moving west and south to where the West Kazakhstan and Atyrau provinces of Kazakhstan are. It remains to be seen how that season of high water of the Ural River will end. It is just beginning for Western Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, the floodwaters on the Emba River, the second largest river in Western Kazakhstan, have receded in the last week. But they had already done their destructive work in Kulsary and its surroundings. It’s too easy to blame nature, saying that flooding now is at its worst in over 80 years. But this looks like nothing more than an attempt by the Kazakh power to shift public attention from its carefree attitude to the possibility of such natural disasters to the forces of nature.
There are so many videos, shot by eyewitnesses, on the net in which you can see how local people in........