After the Georgian capital’s worst floods in living memory swept away buildings and left wild animals roaming the city, Tbilisi residents are now asking if a history of poor urban planning was partly to blame

While viewers around the world were entranced by TV images of wild animals wandering free in the streets of Tbilisi, residents of the Georgian capital faced up to the human and material cost of the floods that hit on 13 June. The flooding, which left 19 people dead and caused damage put at $50 million (£32m), was the biggest natural disaster to befall the city in living memory.

With the painful and slow cleanup operation still ongoing, Tbilisi’s residents are now asking whether this disaster was a freak, unpredictable occurrence – or whether its location and history of poor urban planning has left this city of 1.1 million people more vulnerable than they had realised.

Georgia’s environment minister, Gigla Agulashvili, stands on the edge of the Tskneti-Betania road in the hills above Tbilisi. This is the site where, during a night of exceptionally heavy rains, up to a million cubic metres of earth slid down the cliff into the Vere valley, sending a massive torrent of mud and tree trunks storming into the heart of the city.

“About 60% of the land mass remains on the hillside,” Agulashvili tells me. A lawyer by education, the minister of the environment has become intimately familiar with the geology of the city since the disaster struck. “In heavy rains it could start to move again … but we’re not expecting such huge precipitation in the near future.”

About 60% of the land mass remains on the hillside. In heavy rains it could start to move again Gigla Agulashvili

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Georgians have been amazed by the response of young volunteers to the tragedy. Photograph: Giorgi Isakadze

Behind where the minister is speaking, the ground has fallen away into a gaping pit of rocks, earth and broken trees that goes on for four kilometres. In the distance, a group of geology students huddles around a ministry official who is elucidating the workings of a new landslide early-warning system being installed in the area.

Within minutes of the Vere river breaking its banks, the flood waters had filled Keti Kurashvili’s first-floor apartment up to 25cm from the ceiling. She made a narrow escape by forcing open the front door and clinging to the iron bars on the window. “I just kept thinking, how can I die in all this mud? A dead dog floated up to me and touched my legs, but I kicked it with my foot and the current took it away.”

Sitting with her granddaughter in her hotel accommodation, Kurashvili pauses half way through her story and starts to cry. In the corner of the room, donations of food and clothing are stuffed into thin plastic bags. “To tell you the truth, I’d really lost all hope,” she says. “I thought: ‘OK, that’s it – it’s over.’”

“Generally, we’re seeing post-traumatic stress, anxiety and extreme neurosis,” says psychotherapist Maia Begashvili, wearily drawing on a cigarette in the lobby of the modest hotel that is temporarily housing Kurashvili and other homeless flood victims. Along with her colleagues from the local mental health NGO Dendroni, Begashvili has been providing free visits to displaced families since the floods hit. Given the extent of the trauma, she says, she expects to be working with some of the children for at least a year.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The city’s authorities have faced criticism for the lack of an emergency response plan

Begashvili lists the problems facing those who have lost their homes: “The change in living space, the change in economic situation, the change in social environment ... this is all stressful,” she says. “It’s hard for them to get over it. If they don’t get treatment, they could develop the clinical symptoms of various illnesses.”

The city’s authorities have faced criticism for not having an emergency response plan in place. Some have pointed out they could have at least closed the Vere valley road upon hearing about the massive landslide outside the city. Others have accused the emergency services of responding slowly to the incident. “When I first rang the emergency number, no one was there,” Kurashvili tells me, “and when I called again later, there was still no answer. Do you call that ‘prepared’?”

Many of those affected are asking why they were not told about the risks of living close to the Vere river – which, for most of the year, is no more than a shallow stream. Much of the criticism is focused on the construction tunnels built to channel the river around the zoo from 1960s onwards. Further tunnels, built under a new arterial road in the Vere valley in 2012, became clogged with debris during the flooding, directing the surging flood waters towards adjacent residential areas.

“When they built tunnels around the area of the zoo, even after the floods in the 1960s, it’s clear the wrong decisions were made,” Agulashvili says. “They kept building these tunnels and illegally issuing building permits to private individuals without considering the risks.”

The future of Tbilisi’s zoo itself hangs in the balance. According to the zoo’s director, about half of the animals died in the flooding, and those that survived or were rescued from the city’s streets are being housed in enclosures on higher ground.

The location of the zoo in a river valley next to several major intersections was long questioned by animal rights campaigners, but plans to relocate the zoo were dropped after a change of government in 2012. The billionaire businessman and former prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has offered to finance the zoo’s move to a new location outside of the city, but there have also been calls for it to be scrapped altogether.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An excavator removes a dead bear at the zoo in Tbilisi on 17 June. The zoo lost nearly half its inhabitants to the flood. Photograph: David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters

Svanidze Street in the city’s Vake district was the first populated area to be hit by the flood. Here, the full force of the deluge hit homes built on cheap land next to the river 50 or so years ago. “Absolutely nothing is left,” says Murman Chanturashvili as he sorts pieces of broken furniture and sodden books into piles, ready to be removed by the soldiers and volunteers that are cleaning this area.



Chanturashvili’s first-floor flat is caked with mud up to the ceiling and in places, the soaked parquet floor bulges underfoot. Fortunately, his wife was in Moscow at the time of the flood with their grandchildren. “We were up to our necks in mud. Even the things I can wash down are useless now. Basically, everything was destroyed.”

Not quite everything. Picking through the kitchen, Chanturashvili finds that his stash of homemade wine – sealed in plastic bottles and large glass jars in the cellar – are untouched. Smiling, he rinses the mud off one of the bottles with a hose outside and offers it as a present. Wine is a big deal in Georgia: a tangible link to their fertile land, their unique culture and their deep roots. Despite having to start almost from scratch, Chanturashvili is adamant that he wants to stay here.

“What should I be afraid of?” he asks. “This house has been here for 40 years and nothing like this has happened before. Whoever thinks this place it at risk, let him think so! Our parents lived here and our children will be fine here too.”

Poor urban-planning has turned Tbilisi into a city where further disaster is just waiting to happen

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Murman Chanturashvili clears debris from his ground-floor flat on Svanidze Street, where five of the flood victims perished. Photograph: Giorgi Isakadze

Experts, however, maintain that there are still significant risks. Geologist Claudio Margottini is a Unesco expert and vice-president of the International Consortium on Landslides. Since the flooding, he has been working with the Georgian Ministry of Environment Protection to assess the immediate risk to the city and develop a long-term plan of action.

Although the amount of rain that fell on the night of June 13 was rare, Margottini says that global climate change is making these extreme weather events more and more frequent. “In the long-term, the city needs to develop a land-use plan taking into account maximum precipitation. This needs to be the basis of future town planning, in order to reduce the impact of these phenomena.”

While officials are keen not to exaggerate the risks of future flooding, for many residents, poor urban-planning has turned Tbilisi into a city where further disaster is just waiting to happen.

Tamriko Kadagidze rushed to help when she saw the disaster unfold on Svanidze Street from her nearby apartment. “In other parts of the city, they’re pulling down trees and cutting through cliffs to build apartment blocks,” she says. “If they keep doing this, the same kind of disaster could hit us again.”