Rising ground waters threaten settlements in Chuy Province

Rising ground waters are threatening the lives of thousands of people in the northern Chuy Province, around the capital, Bishkek. "Our house is falling down right before our very eyes. Moisture is everywhere," Nurbek, a 41-year-old resident of Chuy village told IRIN. "Experts told us if the water dropped, then our house would be ruined as the soil would sink right into the earth. Our house is virtually standing on water now." Although the last serious case of rising ground waters in the area occurred back in the 1960s, the situation has been deteriorating again over the past three or four years, mainly due to lack of maintenance. In August 2003, an inter-departmental commission concluded that the problem could have been prevented had it been monitored properly, citing violations of the area's drainage and irrigation systems, coupled with abundant rainfalls over the past year. In Chuy village, home to some 12,000 inhabitants and close to Tokmak, the administrative centre of Chuy province, a record number of homes now face destruction. According to Alexander Jumanaliev, a senior expert at the Kyrgyz emergencies ministry's department of forecasting and monitoring, up to 2,000 people are believed to be directly affected, a situation set to worsen with winter fast approaching. "More than 40 households await the onslaught of winter," Jumadil Usubaliev, the head of the Chuy provincial emergencies department, told IRIN, noting at least 100 homes would eventually need to be completely rebuilt. Compounding the problem were power cuts in the area, preventing residents from heating their homes and drying them out. "The electricity had been switched off in the whole area", Nurbek continued. "It turned out that some dwellers hadn't paid their bills, resulting in the electricity being cut off," he explained, noting that the authorities had said they would not restore the power until at least 50 percent of the defaulters paid up. "How can they pay if they are unemployed, with no income sources, constantly borrowing money for survival here?" he asked.

A resident in Chuy village shows IRIN how rising waters have saturated his walls

Meanwhile, residents whose houses are affected are increasingly feeling the health implications of the situation. "I have three children. My older daughter and I have a cough, and medicine doesn't help. All this moisture and lack of electricity is making it impossible to heat our home," Nurbek said, pointing at the cracked walls of his mud-brick home. While an unusual warm spell is allowing him to keep doors and windows open for ventilation, he said he dreaded the impending frosts, when it would become impossible to heat his house due to water pipelines passing under the floors. "Winter is coming soon and we will be forced to move to another place, but we don't know where," he said. Meanwhile, in Tokmak, some 60 km east of Bishkek and sited in the marshlands of the Chuy valley, the situation looks even bleaker. More than half of the city's 60,000 residents are affected by rising waters and half of this year's harvest has been lost. In an attempt to mitigate the effects, city officials have resorted to turning some of the streets into runoff ditches measuring several metres in depth, a move that has yet to yield positive results. Although drainage channels were routinely cleaned when Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union, all that changed when the country gained its independence in 1991. Today, most of those same channels lie silted up and overgrown with grass due to lack of maintenance. The emergency ministry has undertaken to address some of these problems, but without the necessary financial resources it looks highly unlikely that it will succeed in doing so.