The wildfire spread quickly on Wednesday due to dry and windy weather. (Representative)
In the latest severe weather events this summer, state news agencies reported Thursday that at least two people were killed in flash floods in southern Russia and a woman died in a wildfire in the Urals region.
The bodies of a young woman and an adult man were found Thursday morning after floodwaters receded from Tuapse, a coastal town on the Black Sea about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Sochi resort, the RIA news agency reported.
The flooding was caused by heavy rains on Wednesday, which caused rapid flooding of storm drains. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev said more than three times the average monthly rainfall fell in a single day, forcing the evacuation of campers in a nearby forest.
Videos posted to social media showed city streets turning into rising rivers of gray water, cars submerged and residents trapped in apartment buildings. Local officials said many people were still missing.
Thousands of kilometers away in the Urals region of central Russia, a woman was killed in a wildfire that spread to the small village of Shadurikha, just north of Yekaterinburg, state media quoted local officials as saying.
Dry and windy weather caused the wildfire to spread rapidly on Wednesday, burning 41 homes, TASS news agency reported. It added that two more people have been admitted to the hospital with burns.
A state of emergency has been declared in several Russian regions because of the fast-spreading fires this summer.
According to Greenpeace Russia, the 2021 fire season was Russia’s biggest fire season ever, with 18.8 million hectares of forest destroyed – almost twice the size of the island of Ireland.
Emergency services were still working this week to extinguish wildfires that broke out in early July in Yakutia, a region in Russia’s Far East, local media reported.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV Staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)