April 12: The village of Kaminskoye in Russia’s Kurgan region was evacuated on Friday morning after the water level there rose 1.4 metres (4.59 ft) overnight, regional governor Vadim Shumkov said on the Telegram messaging app.

Kaminskoye is a settlement along the Tobol River which also flows through the regional centre Kurgan, a city of 300,000 people. Shumkov said a deluge could reach Kurgan in the coming days.

“We can only hope the floodplain stretches wide and the ground absorbs as much water as possible in its way,” he said, adding that a dam was being reinforced in Kurgan.

In the city of Orenburg on the Ural River, hundreds of houses were flooded overnight, the RIA news agency reported citing deputy mayor Alexei Kudinov.

He said the deluge was expected to reach its peak on Friday and start subsiding in two days’ time.