Siberia City Braving Floods

Flood waters rose relentlessly around Yakutsk on Monday, engulfing houses in outlying districts, as jets dropped bombs on an 18-mile ice jam clogging the Lena River in an attempt to unblock the swollen waterway.

A wave of meltwater that already had destroyed a smaller town upstream was bearing down on Yakutsk, a city of about 200,000 in eastern Siberia, local Emergency Situations Ministry officials said.

“If the wave reaches us, the water level here could increase by 1 1/2 to two [yards],” said Pyotr Voitovich, head of a rescue information unit.

Rescue workers were warning people in outlying districts to leave their homes before the water rose any further.

In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin opened his weekly Cabinet meeting with a discussion of the flooding.

“The consequences of the floods are grave: About 1,000 houses have been practically washed away,” the Itar-Tass news agency quoted Putin as saying. “Now it is clear that the impact of the flooding will be serious.”

The town of Lensk, 525 miles upstream from Yakutsk, was wiped out by meltwater last week, and many of its 27,000 residents were rescued from their rooftops by helicopter.

The meltwater was released when Sukhoi Su-24 bombers blasted apart a huge ice floe Friday near Lensk, sending a wave of water surging downstream toward Yakutsk.

An exceptionally harsh winter caused a massive ice floe to form on the Lena about 50 miles east of Lensk, leading to a buildup of meltwater after the spring thaw that triggered the flooding, the worst eastern Siberia has seen in a century.

The Emergency Situations Ministry in Moscow said the water level around Yakutsk had risen to about 26 feet. Overnight it breached the critical level of 24 feet--the point at which water starts to flow onto the flood plain.

Emergency workers and student volunteers raced to reinforce dikes around the city with sand, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry.

About 580 people were moved out of Yakutsk on Monday morning, Itar-Tass reported. About 3,580 others from the city had already been evacuated, the ministry said, as had about 42,000 people from other parts of the region.

Other residents took refuge on the roofs of their homes, where some erected small shacks and tents for sleeping. Emergency officials were distributing food and drinking water by boat.