The mayor of the southern Russian city of Orenburg urged residents to evacuate immediately on Friday as water in the nearby Ural River reached critically dangerous levels and was not expected to recede until next week.
Early March's relatively mild start will get wetter in southern areas on Thursday, when a significant amount of rainfall is expected — with up to a full centimetre expected in western areas.
The swelling Tom River in southwestern Siberia has led to a partial dam collapse in the city of Tomsk. This year’s heavy rainfall, combined with abnormally warm spring weather, has led to severe flooding in Russia’s Urals and western Siberia. So far, the floods have submerged around 15,600 homes and 28,000 land plots in 193 Russian towns and cities across 33 regions.
Environmentalists say the latest flooding may have sent radioactive substances into the river, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of people living near the banks of the Tobol downstream. State nuclear agency Rosatom, whose subsidiary operates the mines at the Dobrovolnoye uranium deposit, denied that its mining facilities were impacted by the flood.
KRG’s civil security director Craig Lingard said that in the last decade or so, “we have seen increased snowfall, even more so on the Hudson coast communities.”
Alaskans are taking advantage of rare ice skating conditions on alpine lakes in Chugach State Park, with hundreds of people hiking into the backcountry to skate on smooth ice in the shadow of iconic peaks.
The Hatcher Pass Road in Alaska has opened for the summer season, but deep snow remains at higher elevations, with crews spending the last week digging out the road over the pass before opening it.
A Houston man was injured by a moose near his home, an unusual event linked to increased moose aggression due to harsh winter conditions.
A power line fell on a car in Portland, killing three people and injuring a baby during an ice storm that turned roads and mountain highways treacherous in the Pacific Northwest.
The Western Arctic Caribou Herd has been declining for years, and the migration patterns of the animals have been changing. In several locations in Northwest Alaska, caribou have been arriving later and later in the season. Friday last week, people in Kotzebue finally started seeing caribou — hundreds of them ― crossing the Kotzebue Sound north of town, coming from the Noatak riverside. Ice conditions are one of the reasons for the caribou’s late migration, said Thomas Baker, chair of the Northwest Arctic Subsistence Regional Advisory Council.
The current winter can be classified as abnormal and the snowiest in recent decades, the scientific director of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center, Roman Vilfand.
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