Deadly floods inundate Turkey killing 27 in latest environmental calamity

Flash floods are inundating Turkey’s north even as the country’s south struggled to emerge from raging wildfires in what appears to be the latest in a series of climate change-induced calamities to befall the country.

The death toll in the floods has risen to 27 with scores more feared dead as heavy rains and high water levels swept away roads, bridges and buildings in several provinces along the Black Sea. Video footage showed muddy, fast-moving waters coursing through city streets, swarming buildings and washing away vehicles. Numerous villages and towns were left without electricity as water inundated power plants and felled utility lines. At least a half a dozen bridges collapsed, and photos from the disaster zone showed badly damaged residential buildings.

“We are watching the destruction of our district in a way that cannot be described,”  Muammer Yanik, mayor of Bozkurt in the province of Kastamonu, told the television channel NTV. “Our citizens have been waiting to be saved on roofs. It is not possible to save citizens apart from using helicopters.”

Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, touring the stricken area, described it as “the worst flood disaster I have ever seen”.

The country’s disaster management agency, Afad, dispatched  several thousand rescue workers, as well as boats, divers, water pumps and helicopters to the flood zone to evacuate those in areas struck by floods after the heavy rains began earlier this week.

Turkey has been beset by environmental anomalies in recent weeks including the formation of toxic sea snot believed to be caused by pollutants. Ongoing fires in the country’s southwest have burned away thousands of hectares of woodlands, displaced thousands and killed off untold numbers of animals.

The country’s northern Black Sea provinces regularly suffer flooding. Warmer planetary temperatures caused by the burning of carbon-emitting fossil fuels allow the atmosphere to hold more moisture and increase the frequency and severity of devastating storms. On Wednesday alone, more than nine inches of rain fell on Ayancik, a town of 23,000 people in the northern province of Sinop, according to Afad.

Just a month ago, flash floods in northeastern Turkey led to six deaths and major damage to buildings and infrastructure.

But environmental experts have argued that overdevelopment and poor land management have heightened their impact. Fuelled by cheap credit and lax regulations, Turkey has been on a decades-long building boom, which critics argue largely ignores the mountainous region’s delicate ecology.