Worst Flooding In W. Ukraine In More Than A Decade, With A Big Helping Hand From Illegal Logging
Rain-swollen rivers inundated towns, breached dams and stranded villagers in western Ukraine on Wednesday, in what officials called the region’s worst flooding in more than a decade — with the response this time complicated by the coronavirus epidemic.
As the water rose, one hospital was partially evacuated, but left behind were those with Covid-19, in a rescue that Ukraine’s prime minister said was carried out very carefully to avoid spreading the contagion. In an illustration of the overlapping disasters, people piled into military trucks, many of them wearing face masks, for evacuation over flooded roads. Dams, bridges, dikes and roads were washed away in the Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Chernivtsi regions. More than 200 towns and villages flooded and roads to 34 settlements were cut off by high water, officials said.
At least three people died, including two whose car was swept away in a roiling river, and one person is missing. Denys Shmyhal, the prime minister, toured the area on Wednesday and called the damage worse than that from a major flood in 2008.
An unusual deluge touched off this week’s floods in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. About 70 percent of the region’s average monthly rainfall poured down on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The area was “hit by a force of nature,” Mr. Avakov said. But environmentalists pointed to an unnatural cause: illegal loggers who have taken advantage of the political chaos in Ukraine in recent years to cut down timber in vast forest tracts, increasing storm runoff and flooding.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/world/europe/ukraine-flood-coronavirus.html
