Boating to feed my cat: Historic Urals city flooded

“I cry day and night. I’m 80 years old, I’ve grown old, it’s very hard for me to lift everything myself. My children told me: ‘Mom, wait, it will all pass.’ But I waited, and it only got worse — everything was flooded,” says Grandma Zina, whose house went underwater.

Residents of Irbit have been crying for help for a week and a half — many have lost their roofs, their harvests, and their pets. All because of heavy, almost tropical rains that hit Sverdlovsk Oblast in early July. Now locals travel by boat just to get to their homes. Some are forced to live in the middle of a giant sea — they simply have nowhere to go.

Irbit is an ancient merchant city, founded in 1631 as a settlement, and received city status in 1775 by decree of Empress Catherine II. It is famous for the historic Irbit Fair, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the legendary Ural motorcycles. It is considered Russia’s motorcycle capital.

Journalists from E1.RU came to Irbit, where a state of emergency has been declared, and spoke with flood victims. We show how the city is coping with this disaster.

This is Fyodor. He is now forced to live in his black UAZ (Russian SUV) on Kooperativnaya Street. The road is completely flooded, so he gets into a boat to reach his house. We join him.

It’s hard to imagine that just recently this place was bustling with life — children played on the streets, cars drove on roads (not a sea), and neighbors visited each other.

“In my house, water is up to the window sills. We lifted as much furniture as we could. Now the water is receding, about half a meter lower in three days. I boat to the house to feed my cat. I brought him to my daughter’s place, but he ran back along the fences. Now he lives on the roof,” says Fyodor.

Here is Fyodor’s house. Another boat is parked nearby, and his cat is resting on the roof. The furry creature turned out to be very principled and outright refused to leave his home because of the flood.

We look around and realize that living in such conditions is impossible. It feels as if we are floating down an abandoned street where no one has lived for a long time. But suddenly a voice sounds — a man is standing on a roof.

“Can you give me a ride?” the man shouts to Fyodor.

“Yes, I’ll pick you up soon.”

Some residents of Irbit simply have nowhere to go. This man had to huddle on the second floor of the house, where the water didn’t reach. On the roof, he has laid out his belongings, tools, and dishes — in short, everything he managed to save. We climb up to visit him using a construction ladder.

“What else can I do? They give me boat rides when needed. Everything is lost, and I lost my cat too. When the water came the second time, we didn’t expect there to be so much,” the homeowner shares.

We continue floating. Along the way, Fyodor recalls that the water rose very quickly. Together with his children, he tried to save the furniture in the house — time was measured in minutes.

“We took apart the kitchen set. We put everything on tables, but the tables got soaked. We paid 80,000 rubles (approximately $900 at current rates) for the kitchen, plus the drywall walls, all collapsed. We bought expensive linoleum,” he says about the damage.

According to our companion, many of his neighbors had done renovations and invested considerable money, and now construction materials are floating near their country houses.

Every day, neighbors gather and discuss how to live on, and the main question is: who will compensate all this?

The water has receded from Olga Veniaminovna’s house. But while the living space can eventually be restored, the harvest is beyond saving. The hostess gives us a tour of the plot with tears in her eyes.

“We’ll get through it sadly. We have water in the bathhouse, the whole vegetable garden is gone, everything in the greenhouses is wet. Everything turned black. All the tomatoes wilted, the seedlings were good, so sorry. The water rose very quickly, literally in seconds. The dog barked itself hoarse, out of sorts, his kennel was flooded,” she sighs.

Vladimir Gennadyevich has already resigned himself — he strides confidently in flip-flops toward his house and says this is not the worst thing that could have happened to him.

“Just don’t fall, careful. Let’s see: you can’t live there, you need to restore floors, walls — everything. It’s even improved now, the water has receded,” he shows one of the rooms.

For a week and a half, Nikolai has been forced to sleep in his Zhiguli (Lada) car together with his dog. It is also impossible to stay in his house — inside it’s humid and smelly: “It was completely flooded before, now you just can’t go in. Everything is soaked, need to clean up. I have nowhere else to sleep.”

80-year-old Grandma Zina is crying — her garden and house are flooded. The rooms need new linoleum and wallpaper.

“The linoleum is new, what to do with it now? Have to remove it, dry it. The bathhouse is low, all in water. I don’t know how it will be… Potatoes, carrots, everything washed away. I picked the tomatoes that ripened yesterday. I feel so sorry for the flowers… The lilies bloomed so well this year,” the grandmother shares.

The Irbit Center for Social Assistance to Families and Children on Karl Marx Street is also afloat. The guard sighs heavily and tells us that all the children were evacuated to Sloboda (likely a nearby village). Despite the unbearable conditions, staff continue working there.

The floods have affected not only private sectors but entire intersections. This is the situation now on Svobody Street — road signs and an abandoned car peek out of the water.

Near the Irbit Dairy Plant, residents suffer not only from the flood but also from a terrible smell. Their plots have turned into swamps that poison the air.

“There’s just an unbearable smell here,” we say to the homeowner, who simply screams in helplessness.

“This is not a swamp, it’s some kind of… You can’t even go into the yard! There are dead fish floating there, who could survive in such water? Such a smell all over the house,” the woman says.

One of the temporary accommodation centers is now on Sovetskaya Street — in School No. 5. EMERCOM (Ministry of Emergency Situations) personnel from Krasnoufimsk and Yekaterinburg are staying there. Their schedule is tough: they provide assistance without days off and rotate once a week.

The rescuers sleep right in the classrooms on provided mattresses. There is not much choice — they just have to be patient and do their job.

“In the former cloakroom, we dry our things; they provided us with radiators. The humidity is very high. In the evening, they bring us food, we eat well here,” one of the female staff members says.

Take a look at a few more photos from flooded Irbit, showing the scale of the tragedy.

The flood in Sverdlovsk Oblast is intensifying. The day before, on 20 July, several more settlements were flooded, a dam burst in Sysertsky District, leading to the opening of a temporary accommodation center there.

All materials about how the region is going underwater are collected in a special section.