River Syrdarya bursts its banks in Kzyl-Orda

Warm weather caused the Syrdarya river to burst its banks in southern Kazakhstan on Tuesday, although no settlements in the area were affected, the emergency agency of Kazakhstan said on Thursday. "Currently the situation is under control and routine water discharge [from the Chardara reservoir upstream], which is now 700 cu m per second, is under way," Kayrat Tarbaev, a spokesman for the emergency agency, told IRIN from the Kazakh capital, Astana, on Thursday. According to the emergency agency, unexpectedly warm weather caused ice to melt and water to wash away banks of the Syrdarya river - one of the major water sources in Central Asia - in Karmakshin, Zhalagash and Syrdarya districts of the southern Kzyl-Orda province. "The washing away of banks was caused by water flowing over the ice cover," Tarbaev explained. Repair and bank reinforcement works are now being carried out by the emergency body in the three districts. The total area flooded was only 1.5 sq km by Thursday, the agency said. Last year, high water discharges from Kyrgyz and Tajik reservoirs to the flow of the Syrdarya and its tributaries resulted in an unprecedented inflow into the Chardara reservoir and subsequent flooding downstream. The total area flooded was almost 600 sq km, forcing the evacuation of more than 2,000 people in the region. However, Kazakh emergency officials said that there were no signs of a similar scenario this year. "The water inflow is normal and the recent incident is related only to warm weather and ice melting," they said. Meanwhile, in northern Tajikistan, heavy rains and snow caused the collapse of a house which killed seven people on the first day of the year. "Due to heavy rain mixed with snow in the Ganchin district's Itorchun village [in the northern Sogd province], a house collapsed killing a family of seven people, including three children," Jamilia Tilloeva, a press officer at the Tajik Emergency Ministry, told IRIN from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. "It was not a landslide. The house itself collapsed due to high precipitation and a special commission is investigating the case," Tilloeva added. A day before the incident, two local residents were killed by an avalanche in the eastern Ishkashim district. "These two people reportedly climbed the mountains for unclear reasons and were caught in an avalanche," the Tajik Emergency Ministry said, adding that their bodies had been found and given to their relatives. The Central Asian region is prone to various natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, floods, avalanches and droughts. Natural disasters have killed about 2,500 people and affected some 5.5 million (almost 10 percent of the total population) in Central Asia over the past decade, according to the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO). In 2003 in Tajikistan alone, 120 incidents of flooding, avalanches and landslides were recorded, as well as 12 significant earthquakes.