Chimaev Sends Aid Trucks to Flooded Dagestan Villages

UFC fighter Khamzat Chimaev has sent humanitarian aid to flood victims in Dagestan. Chechen Human Rights Commissioner Mansur Soltayev said the shipment consisted of ten trucks loaded with food and essentials for families left homeless. Seven of the trucks were headed to the Khasavyurt district, according to TASS as cited by Caucasian Knot.

The homes of about 1,400 people in Khasavyurt district villages are uninhabitable after the water, which also destroyed livestock and farms. Villages hit in the first days of the flooding had already been receiving large amounts of aid, and Chimaev's seven trucks came on top of it.

What the floods left behind

Heavy rain has been falling across the North Caucasus since late March, and the flooding is among the most destructive in recent years. Dagestan and Chechnya took the greatest damage. Dagestan's head, Sergey Melikov, reported on April 7 that more than 6,200 people had been affected there. About 1,400 Khasavyurt residents were moved to a temporary accommodation center.

A district administration representative named Adilyotar, Tutlar, Novoye Tsilitli, Kadyrotar and Botayurt among the villages that suffered significant damage in the first wave. "In Adilyotar, floodwaters destroyed a school, outbuildings, residential buildings, barns, and poultry houses," the representative said, adding that more than 460 homes were flooded and residents moved to temporary shelters. In Novoye Tsilitli 120 households were damaged, and 43 patients were evacuated from the hospital in Botayurt.

The scale reaches well beyond one district. Caucasian Knot put the number of residents in the flood zone in Dagestan at about 1.5 million, and the republic's state of emergency has been raised from regional to federal. In Makhachkala alone, victims filed 82,900 requests for one-time assistance and more than 10,000 claims for property loss compensation.

By April 8, a Khasavyurt resident named Aslan said, the situation had stabilized somewhat. Blogger Rasul Maazov, who toured the villages with volunteers, wrote that aid was arriving daily in such volumes that some sites had run out of storage space and one village had temporarily suspended accepting it.

Source: Caucasian Knot