Krymsk. Eyewitness. Direct speech.


  • Photographer
    Kirill Ovchinnikov
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    12-15.07.2012
  • Technical Info
    6x6 color negative film

01. Valentina Ivanovna, 82: “I have nothing to fear for, tell people the truth, how we were drowned…” Lagernaya street. 02. Mikhail Nikanorovitch: « My wife, Antonina Gavrilovna, drowned. She woke me up at 3.10 a.m. asking to rescue our TV set as the water was filling the house. I looked around – the water was already waist-high. We couldn’t go out as the door was jammed. So we stood on the tables till the water came up to our chin. “We are going to die”, - I told my wife and decided to grab the coach floating around and swam back to her. When I reached my wife, she had already choked… There were only 10 cm left to the ceiling. I stood like this till morning… The horologe stopped at 4.28 a.m. Adagumskaya street, 122. 03. Irina, roommate: “Owners drowned. All of them. Lubov Melnichenko and Nikolay Zaborzev. Pensioners. I was stopped by police this day. So I was not there. There were four more roommates. They went away probably… Nobody helped”. There are two dead persons by this address in the death roll - Zaborzeva Nelly and ZinchenkoValentina…Troitskaya street, 124. 04. Ludmila Vasiljevna, 75 years old: “The doors wouldn’t open, the windows were under the water, I was swimming under the ceiling, I was so afraid…my grandson Stasik broke the slate and pulled me to the roof…They could have warned us. Save yourself! May be they decided to drown all pensioners so they would not have to pay us anymore?” Olimpijskaya street, 18. 05. Natalia Anatolievna and Evgeniy Vladimirovich. The water level is seen above the window. Troitskaya street, 160

Story

In the middle of the night of July 7th,2012 the small town of Krymsk was struck by a huge wave of water descending from the surrounding mountains. The flood hit the city when most residents were asleep. The flood wave reached the height of 7 m (23 ft), submerging many houses to the ceiling and drowning those who could not escape in time. The floods claimed the lives of 171 people.
I was not looking for those guilty, and did not count the number of dead. I just walked down the street from house to house and the moments of this night appeared in front of my eyes after every story I heard. Every wall, every window and сlock were telling me something that eyewitnesses were unable to say. I saw a line level where the water stopped on every wall - dirty slush in which defenseless people floated. This line separated life and death. 10 inches up to the ceiling meant 10 inches of life and air. An unbroken window, a closed door - no way out ... I decided to tell people about what happened through portraits of witnesses of this tragedy. Each story is unique and very subjective, each victim could not see anything more around but himself and his family, and when the number of people reached 50, I realized that with the help of those evidences the whole story of tragedy had been completed.

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