Water levels continue to rise after dam burst near Kazakhstan border after torrential rain
Thousands of people have been evacuated from the Orenburg region, in the southern Urals near Kazakhstan, due to flooding after a dam burst.
Emergency services had been working through the night after the dam burst in the city of Orsk on Friday after torrential rain.
The press service of the Orenburg governor said 4,208 people, including 1,019 children, had been evacuated and more than 2,500 homes were affected.
Russia opened a criminal case for “negligence and violation of construction safety rules” over the burst dam, which was built in 2014.
There’s video of the dam leak starting and progressing to full breach. It was on an Earthen berm with just a trickle at first during daylight. In the video people are standing on the berm watching it leak. You can see smaller, then larger chunks of Earth breaking away in the stream. Each piece that falls away makes the water surge through faster. A couple of cuts occur and its apparent the growth has continued. The final cut is nightfall and shows an Earth moving machine pushing what I think are large sandbags into the breach, but its a gushing torrent by this point. The Earthen damn is falling about almost a meter each time wider. Finally the Earth moving machine pulls back as two to three meters of damn collapses in before the video stops.
No drone in site.