Sliding trouble

The nature still shows its character to us: more than ten landslides took place during the last two weeks in the danger zone from Chimbulak village to Enbekshikazakh district, and around one hundred in total during the spring. The emergency remains, but people, who live here under threat, don't want to leave their homes despite warnings from rescuers about the risk and offers from authorities to move to safer villages.

The slopes of local mountains are saturated with humid, it penetrated two metres into the depth. But not only this factor influences the movement of mountain mass. Rains and melting glaciers do not surprise anyone here, they used to happen before, but there have not been such big quantities of sliding land even in the most humid years.

Specialists suppose that frequent landslides this year could be due to permanent tremors. They can't be called strong, but, nevertheless, they cause certain effects, displacing the ground from the slopes. Besides, it can testify a growth of general seismic activity in Zailisky Alatau foothills and near Almaty. Therefore seismologists have started to study the situation.

Meanwhile residents and policemen are on shift at specially established checkpoints, there are signs warning about the danger, the traffic of transport vehicles and cattle has been forbidden. People are tense, the risk is high, there are no gorges in this area, where the landslides would not leave their traces.

You are reminded that in the night from March 13 to 14 a landslide near "Ak-Kain" sanatorium in Talgar district "swallowed" two houses. Three million cubic metres of mud and rocks went came down on Taldybulak village with a 50 km per hour. People, who had lived in the houses were buried under the heavy liquid mud masses, only a few were rescued.

Rescuers sought for bodies more than one day. Among the victims there were twenty Kazakhstani people, including six children - from four months to seventeen years, and nine Chinese citizens who rented apartments there. The damage is estimated in KZT 75 million, but no monetary figure can account for human deaths.

These places were considered to be dangerous earlier as well. Last year the emergency management service workers warned residents about the risk that they were undergoing in spring and demanded that they immediately left their habitations. Thirty families moved then. This year there were no such warnings. One of the reasons this being unprepared for the emergency is a reduction of checkpoints and research works in potentially dangerous areas.

Since the beginning of the nineties the monitoring of dangerous areas was stopped. There are quite a few of them in Almaty oblast: locations near Besagash, Talgar, Katyr Bulak rivers are considered to be dangerous areas. But if one considers only those areas where a landslide can threaten people, there will be much less of them, than all potentially dangerous Alatau foothills. However no money was allocated for such programmes and only after the landslide the authorities decided to finance research by scientists and specialists in all districts of Zailisky Alatau that are dangerous for people.

Researchers must make a map of hot spots and make their propositions on preventive measures.

First of all it means moving people to other places. But even now residents of nearly seven hundred houses that are under a real threat of being drowned under landslides are not in a hurry to leave their homes. It is possible to understand them, the authorities only propose that they move, dismantling their houses to build new ones. No money is allocated for their move from the budget, while the people themselves cannot afford it even if they receive loans and benefits when land plots are allocated.

However, the state helped the victims in March. The money was allocated to the families of the victims, those who lost houses received housing. Political parties, commercial structures, and ventures helped them. An editing complex "Dawir" that had bought land, where the destroyed houses were found, gave fifty thousand KZT to each family that had remained homeless, and one hundred thousand to the families of the victims.

But those are consequences of a thing that could be prevented. In due course it could be suggested how dangerous the construction of different buildings on Koktobe hill was. Now there is a huge crack on the slope of the hill. Its length is more than one hundred fifty metres, the subsidence of the soil in the fracture reached half metre. In the case that it is oversaturated with humid or if there is an earth tremor, according to specialists, up to three hundred fifty cubic metres of mud can go down, which, given the steepness of the slope, will reach private houses in the saddle in one minute.

Other Koktobe slopes are dangerous as well - in Turksib district, above the sanatorium of MIA veterans. The total volume of the landslide can reach two million cubic metres. And only when the danger had become obvious, Koktobe was closed for car traffic, the restaurant activities were suspended, an emergency was announced, and reinforcing works were started. Does anybody try to find out who and why permitted the construction, why s/he did not control the correct discharge of the sewer, that was saturating the hill with humid for years, because of which the crack was probably formed.

And how many restaurants and cafes were built above the dam that protects and has already saved the city from mudflows? Now, in summer, people enjoy themselves in those cafes and restaurants, they celebrate their events there. But neither the customers nor the owners realise that they are under a big risk.

Maybe those who make their suggestions about reasons for the inactivity of the authorities, for the absence of preventive measures, which could save human lives are right? And the suggestion is the following. If specialists carried out their inspections and made maps with "hot spots", land plots would not be allocated for construction anymore and so the money extorted for permits would be lost. And if such maps appeared then all those who live there would have to be moved and the state does not provide any money for that.

So one can only hope that the nature spares people…