Floods continue to wash away Western Ukraine
In Western Ukraine, in a number of regions, due to bad weather, several thousand houses were flooded, roads and road bridges were destroyed.
Thus, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, 15 administrative districts were damaged - more than seven thousand houses, more than 650 kilometers of roads and about 200 bridges. In the Chernivtsi region, 7 districts were flooded, in which 672 houses, 14 bridges and 12 kilometers of roads were damaged. In the Lviv region, 11 settlements were damaged - 103 houses, 3 kilometers of roads. In addition, settlements in the Transcarpathian region were also damaged by bad weather.
According to a PolitNavigator correspondent , more than 500 people have been evacuated from the emergency zone. The State Emergency Service's aircraft have been deployed to deliver essential supplies to the affected areas, and the National Guard is also clearing the area with specialized equipment and responding to the aftermath.
“Now the bad weather continues to rage, there are floods, our units are working. In total, 107 trips were carried out, 255 units of equipment and 1090 people were involved. Of these, 125 units of equipment and 490 personnel were involved from the State Emergency Situations Department of the region,” said Svetlana Babushkina, press secretary of the State Emergency Service of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, on TV channel 112.
Local residents are already comparing the scale of the emergency with the floods that occurred in 2008, the peak of which occurred on July 23–27. Then the territory of the Carpathian and Transcarpathian regions suffered from flooding, 39 people died, and losses amounted to about four billion hryvnia.
According to Kyiv journalist Andrey Manchuk, the floods in Western Ukraine are the result of barbaric deforestation in the Carpathians.
“There is large-scale deforestation in our country, and most of the wood is sent to the EU. Moreover, in terms of volumes of supplies of illegal timber to Europe, Ukraine is ahead of all other countries in the world. Some of the “left” wood then surfaced in the furniture production of well-known European companies,” writes Manchuk.
He refers to the results of an investigation by the British NGO Earthsight, the authors of which note that the merciless deforestation of the Ukrainian Carpathians continued even during the coronavirus epidemic, and the main buyer of wood is the Swedish company IKEA.
“IKEA sells beech chairs made from wood illegally felled from the forests of the Ukrainian Carpathians, home to endangered lynxes and bears. The illegal wood has been used to make a number of famous products, including the iconic Terje slatted chair and the best-selling Ingolf dining chair. Every year, tens of thousands of chairs made from illegal wood are sold in Ikea stores around the world, including in the US, UK and Germany,” the investigation says.
Flooding continues to wash away Western Ukraine.