Financing of repair work is to be discussed in Moscow on May 29, Putin announced. On Wednesday, the waters surged past the region's biggest city, Yakutsk, and began to fall. Villages downstream are still under threat, as emergency workers have not destroyed all the ice jams clogging the river. The flood last week ravaged Lensk, a town of 26,000, before invading some outlying neighborhoods in Yakutsk. It has killed six people and left at least two missing.
Siberian rivers flood regularly because they flow from south to north.
The snow that melts in the south, where the spring thaw begins earlier, runs into ice in the still-frozen north. This year an unusually frigid winter and a warm spring combined to create a deluge, the likes of which authorities haven't seen in Siberia for a century. Emergency workers have battled the ice jams using jet bombers and icebreakers. Alongside local volunteers, they have piled up sand on dikes that have succeeded in holding back the water in most of Yakutsk. Copyright 2001, The Associated Press.