April 6 (UPI) — Russian authorities have ordered citizens to evacuate parts of the Ural mountains city of Orsk after a dam burst, according to official media.
According to Interfax, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry deployed emergency teams to Orsk as a preventive measure after the dam broke on Friday.
The ministry said residents in the possible flood area were moved to temporary accommodation facilities. Rescuers said they are working with local authorities to reinforce the dam and deal with the aftermath of the break.
The dam break happened in two places, the official Russian news agency TASS reported. By Saturday morning, water from the Ural River had flooded around 2,400 homes and 3,000 adjacent areas in Orsk.
Around 2,000 people were evacuated, and more than 300 people were placed in temporary shelters, the report said.
The regional prosecutor’s office said the collapse was caused by “untimely measures taken to maintain the hydraulic structure in proper technical condition.”
Authorities said they found the bodies of three people in the flooded areas, but two of them weren’t killed by the disaster.
The dam failure in Orsk, located about 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, comes after heavy rainfall drenched the Ural Mountains and nearby regions. Kazakhstan has evacuated nearly 47,000 people, and floods are advancing in Barnaul in western Siberia.
“This is perhaps the largest disaster in terms of scale and impact in the last 80-plus years,” Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said in a speech.
Orsk is a city of about 200,000 people in the Orenburg region near the Russian border with Kazakhstan.