Due to heavy rainfall, rivers flowing through Lori and neighboring Tavush province burst their banks early on Sunday, washing away roads, bridges and parts of a railway and flooding towns and villages located along them. The national Rescue Service evacuated 429 local residents.
According to Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Gnel Sanosian, some 5,500 other people remained stranded in Akhtala, a mining town close to the Georgian border, and several nearby villages. Rescuers supplied them with food and drinking water for the second consecutive day.
The Akhtala area was cut off because the floods left a bridge on the sole road connecting it to the provincial capital Vanadzor under water. Sanosian said authorities on the ground are scrambling to build a bypass road.
“We have a total of 14 damaged bridges,” Sanosian said during Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s video conference with members of a task force coordinating the Armenian government’s response to the calamity.
The floods also seriously damaged the two national highways leading to Armenia’s main border crossing with Georgia. The damage was particularly severe to the M6 highway passing through Lori.
“At eight or nine sections, the road was completely or partially destroyed,” Sanosian said, adding that rebuilding them “will take a lot of time and resources.”
In Lori, M6 runs parallel to the sole railway connecting Armenia to Georgia. Sanosian said a total of 2.5 kilometers of rail track there were washed away. In the minister’s words, “it will take some time” to restore railway communication between the two countries.
According to a government statement, Pashinian and other officials agreed on the need for “international support in solving problems” caused by the floods. The statement said nothing about the scale of such aid that could be requested by Yerevan.
It also remained unclear whether the government could compensate Lori and Tavush residents whose homes were destroyed or seriously damaged on Sunday. Some of them also lost shops and other businesses or had goods perish because of flood waters.
In a flooded neighborhood of Alaverdi, another town in Lori, the owner of a butcher shop was desperate to find another refrigerated place for her meat worth thousands of dollars.
“We don’t have electricity, water or gas,” the woman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “The neighborhood is cut off. Even bread can’t be brought here right now. I don’t know what to do.”
During the video conference, Pashinian, who visited some of the flooded areas on Sunday, praised his government’s response to the natural disaster. He said local residents that he spoke to shared his view that “consequences of this disaster could have been much more severe.”
However, the government faced growing questions about its failure to warn the locals of the risk of severe flooding beforehand despite heavy rainfall forecast by its meteorological service.
“You can’t tell in advance how much the water level will rise,” the head of the Rescue Service, Kamo Tsutsulian, told reporters in Alaverdi. “Had we known that the water level will rise that much and cause so much damage we would have naturally carried out evacuations in advance.”
Asked why such precautionary measures were taken in Georgia, Tsutsulian said: “I don’t know.”