By bne Tehran bureau
Sudden floods around the Iranian city of Mashhad have taken the lives of at least five people, two of whom were stuck in a submerged car, with another 12 people missing on May 15.
Areas along the border with Turkmenistan have seen significant rainfall and large hail with streets, homes and shops all under more than 90cm of water in some locations. At the same time, further rainfall is expected across central Asia with more predicted close to the Afghan and Tajik border.
City fire brigade divers retrieved the bodies of a man and a woman, both approximately 50 years old, in the northern Iranian city, which has seen several recent days of floods and freak weather events in part due to the wetter regional climate this year.
In some parts
Rescue operations have continued late in the evening to find other potential victims throughout the night.
On May 15, clouds darkened the city of Mashhad at around 2:00 in the afternoon local time, followed by torrential rains that caused heavy floods in the streets of the metropolis, the second most populated city in Iran after the capital Tehran.
According to videos published on social media, cars were submerged and swept away by the water’s current.
Several districts reported power cuts, with people getting stuck in lifts. People also called rescue teams to report the falling of trees and flooding of houses, according to Hamidreza Kafinia, managing director of the Mashhad Fire Brigade.
City authorities immediately issued a warning, urging people to stay home and avoid driving across the city. This is while all tourist sites and parks were shut down until further notice.
Weather forecasts suggest that rainfall will continue until early next week. They are likely to cause more floods in Mashhad and other cities in the province of Khorasan, Afghanistan, and neighbouring Turkmenistan.
Rainfall in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, over three days last week equalled almost one-quarter of the city’s annual average precipitation. A Moscow-based meteorology news website said precipitation in some parts of the country reached around 40% of the yearly norm, Havli reported. A The Turkmen capital appears to have been spared major negative consequences from the heavy rain thanks to mudflow prevention structures completed in 2022 by a Russian company, Vozrozhdenie. Several regions of Iran haveexperienced floods over the past month, which, despite replenishing water resources, have caused damage to urban and rural structures.
In one recent incident, fish were seen raining down on a central city in the country, which is believed to be the only recorded fish-raining incident in West Asia.
Earlier in April, Dubai was hit with anentire year’s worth of rainfall in a single day, turning the international airport into a lake the subway.
With the temperature of the seas currently at fresh all-time highs, that is providing the energy for extreme wind events, and last year saw tornadoes and tropical storms form overseas that sucked up huge quantities of water in Florida and other places. These events are becoming increasingly common.
As bne IntelliNews reported in March, one of the effects of global warming is increased rainfall as warmer temperatures cause more water to evaporate. After the hottest year on record in 2023, the atmosphere already holds circa 10% more water vapour today than just 30 years ago. The warmer the atmosphere gets, the more water it can hold – about 7% more per 1°C of warming according to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation – and scientists have already observed a significant increase in atmospheric moisture, reports Climate Signals.
The increased vaporisation leads to more rain, and the changes in extreme rainfall increase even faster than the rate of vaporisation, increasing 15% for each 1C increase in temperature.
As the now annualdisaster season gets underway, several regions have already been hit with deluges this year, including France and Italy. In the last weeks Kazakhstan and Russia have been hit with “biblical” rains after the rapid melting of the winter’s heavy snowfall caused the connecting river to burst its banks.
