Wildfires, floods kill at least 5 people across Russia

At least four people have died in flash floods in southern Russia and one woman was killed in a wildfire in the Urals region, Russian officials and state media reported on Thursday (July 13), in this summer's latest severe weather events.

Local investigators said the bodies of four people had been recovered in and around Tuapse, a coastal town on the Black Sea.

Emergency workers were still searching for two missing people, including a teenager, the regional investigative department said on the Telegram messaging app.

The floods were caused by heavy rains on Wednesday which quickly overwhelmed storm drains. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev said that three times the average monthly rainfall had fallen in a single day, forcing the evacuation of campers in a nearby forest.

Videos posted on social media showed streets in the town turned into surging rivers of brown water, submerging cars and trapping residents in apartment buildings. Several people are still missing, local authorities said.

Thousands of kilometres away in the Urals region of central Russia, wildfires tore through the small village of Shaidurikha, just north of Yekaterinburg, killing one woman, state media reported, citing local authorities.

The wildfire spread quickly on Wednesday due to dry and windy weather, burning 41 houses, the TASS news agency reported. Two more people were hospitalised with burns, it said.

States of emergency have been declared in multiple Russian regions this summer over fast-spreading blazes.

The 2021 fire season was Russia's largest ever, with 18.8 million hectares of forest destroyed, according to Greenpeace Russia — about two times the size of the island of Ireland.

Emergency services were still working this week to extinguish wildfires in Yakutia, a region in Russia's far east, that began in early July, local media reported.

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