Flood

There are again more deaths than officials claim
There have never been natural disasters of this magnitude under Putin. When you sit in Novorossiysk and watch footage of the official chronicle (Putin’s meeting with Deputy Shoigu), you generally cease to understand what is happening.
Not all nature is under control
“Mostly tourists died,” the deputy minister tells the president in a trembling voice. — The entire local population was warned... and therefore saved...
— Well, weren’t the tourists warned? - Putin asks menacingly.
- They were warned... but they didn’t listen...
A well-known thing is tourists. The people are shaggy, rebellious... Meanwhile, the number of tourists among the dead is quite small - there are almost no “savages” in Shirokaya Balka, where the maximum number of victims was recorded. This entire village consists of tourist bases, which are relatively inexpensive; There is only one decent sanatorium there - “Lesnaya Gavan”. The legend about tourists who did not listen to the storm warning is needed only to report to the president: they warned! Meanwhile, tornadoes, of which there were two in a row in Shirokaya Balka, on August 8 and 9 (both at noon), are not among the predicted natural phenomena. It's like a thunderstorm: you can predict it, but you never know where the lightning will strike.
There have not been such tornadoes on this coast for 150 years, during which at least some information about the weather in the vicinity of Novorossiysk has been preserved. I understand the desire of the current government to prove that it is able to control the elements. But controlling the elements is not the task of a leader. His tasks include organizing timely assistance. And to do this, we must first understand the scale of the disaster. And do not report for three days that 15 people died: after the first tornado it was clear that the number of victims of the flood and tornado was at least three times higher. Eyewitnesses in Shirokaya Balka talk about 60 dead, whom they saw in person. And even though fear is wide-eyed, even if the witnesses experienced a severe shock and will not recover from it soon, but when the mudflow carries away entire houses and buses, and the first floors of all buildings are completely flooded and half filled with liquid mud, it is clear that the list of victims in the village is far from being limited to a dozen disobedient tourists by the sea...
The tendency to necessarily look for those to blame for a natural disaster is also a trend of the newest, Putin times, when, according to the old KGB tradition, overcoming the consequences of any tragedy is limited to punishing the guilty. In Novorossiysk, according to Venetian custom, the sea should have been carved out. Now they are writing that the authorities did not strengthen the dams, did not use and did not fill up artificial irrigation reservoirs in Abrau-Dyurso on time, but the Bakanka River, which overflowed its banks and flooded houses up to the roofs in the village of Nizhnebakanskoye, did not overflow because of a dam break. There was, however, talk that the flood happened because of the water treatment facilities in Tonnelnoye - they were allegedly afraid that they would be flooded and opened the floodgates. There are no locks there, as they explained to us in Tonnelny. The flood happened due to unexpected, unprecedented rain that lasted three days, and because of two tornadoes that collected water in the Black Sea and poured it on the mountain slopes near Novorossiysk. The Bakanka has already returned to its previous channel and has a completely peaceful appearance - only along its banks, in the courtyards of houses that stood near the river, are heaps of dirt, silt, grass, fallen trees and collapsed fences. It will take a month or two to sort through all these piles, stripped trunks and uprooted roots. Before our eyes, two cars of electricians arrived: they began to repair the electrical wiring right away. There is no light in the village, and therefore no water; All the soda at the local market was immediately snapped up. It's good that they brought a new one.
The tornado cut Shirokaya Balka in half
As for Shirokaya Balka, on which the tornado literally crashed (eyewitnesses say that a wide, trembling gray pillar as high as the sky was rushing straight towards them), the liquidation of the consequences there will take not a month, as the cheerful soldiers optimistically promised in a television interview, but no less than six months. At the same time, the Ministry of Emergency Situations has repeatedly stated that their competence includes searching for the dead and rescuing the wounded, and not clearing the territory. The horror is that without clearing the territory, it will not be possible to find many of the dead: some were carried away by the mudflow into the sea, others were buried under piles of uprooted trees, under layers of mud. The slope of Shirokaya Balka is more than two kilometers long; on the first day the stream rushed along it for an hour and fifteen minutes, on the second - a little less than an hour. The path of the stream is marked by mountains of debris, bushes, branches, and the remains of overturned cars (about twenty were carried into the sea, about fifty were flattened and crushed in total). It is absolutely unclear by whose efforts to remove all this. In the former Lesnaya Gavan canteen, a field kitchen has been set up, soup and tea have been delivered, but the only crane working to clear the rubble is capable of hooking no more than one large tree at a time. And there are many thousands of such trees, and they are all molded into one wood-mud monolith. A couple of slingers hook a pile of all this garbage, but it crumbles into the air. This requires a bulldozer, and more than one.
The regional authorities do not have enough equipment: everything has been thrown into clearing Novorossiysk, the main showcase of the affected area. After all, it is by the condition of the city streets that those at the top will judge how to overcome the consequences of the Novorossiysk disaster. Even the Ministry of Emergency Situations arrived in Shirokaya Balka with a huge delay - not an hour later, as they cheerfully reported on TV, but eight hours after the first tornado, at eight in the evening. Since the substation exploded on August 8 - and it was located higher up the slope, in an area that is now completely inaccessible - there is no reason to hope that light and water supply in this area will be restored within a week. What can we say about the beach: the tornado cut the village in half, half was not damaged at all, and the other took the full brunt of the blow. The border runs exactly along the boat station. It’s good that the catamarans survived: on these catamarans, the station owner and his sons went out to sea after the second tornado to pick up survivors and saved seven people. Exactly half the beach in the village is littered with wood chips, former fences, and car wrecks.
It's scary in Balka now. There are a huge number of dragonflies flying around - it is unclear where they came from; the air trembles from their iridescent wings. All the courtyards of the bases and private estates are littered with linen, mattresses, and old coats - the population is drying what they managed to pull out of the flooded first floors.
A young, concentrated Armenian sits near one entrance and, knitting his thick eyebrows, rinses in a basin the most valuable thing that he saved from a dilapidated apartment: wedding photographs. He washes them carefully, the water in the basin is already all dirty, but the photographs get wet and fall apart in his hands.
“Most of it was in the album,” he says joyfully. — I saved the album after the first tornado...
Nearby, his neighbor is washing out the change he collected from the pockets of his salvaged clothes: the paper bills are either torn or soaked beyond recognition. Some things, however, remained in the apartment, but the neighbor does not know how to get into the apartment. There the water is up to the neck.
Some suffer, others rest
And here’s something else that characterizes the latest Russian natural disaster: it’s, of course, not just about official lies, cheerful reports, “timely warnings” and hasty organizational conclusions. The point is in the Russian people themselves, who have changed a lot. Previously, overcoming the elements was a team effort, but now victims of floods and mudflows have a strong feeling that they have been abandoned by their country. Many media outlets, after the water subsided, joyfully trumpeted: people continue to go to the Krasnodar Territory! So new tourists, brave souls, set up a tent on the seashore: our man is not afraid of the elements and wants to relax, no matter what!
So here it is. The worst thing I saw in Shirokaya Balka was not the diving work (new corpses are recovered every day), not the looters breaking out radios and carburetors from broken cars, and not even the boy washing wedding photographs. But this second half of the village, which continues to roast in the sun, eat barbecue, drink beer... After all, the elements did not touch them, and they will not allow their vacation to be ruined. It doesn’t occur to them to walk half a kilometer and come to the damaged part of Shirokaya Balka with the only question: is anything needed? Money, help? Should I help you sort out the rubble, remove the car hanging from the fence, or clear the mudflow from the rooms? In the end, together it's not so scary...
No one will remember how after the Tashkent earthquake the whole country restored Tashkent, how streams of voluntary builders poured into Ashgabat, how after the Spitak disaster the entire Armenian diaspora sent doctors and food to the disaster area...
Where is the Russian diaspora that would help the residents of the affected area?
Dmitry Bykov, Novorossiysk—Shirokaya Balka—Moscow.