Abkhazia’s Gali (Gal) district has declared a state of emergency after several water pipes burst, leaving the town of Gali without a centralised water supply.
The Gali District Administration Commission decided to declare a state of emergency in the city on Tuesday, forcing the closure of two city schools and three kindergartens. To ensure adequate water supply, water trucks were organised to supply drinking water to the population.
‘The Inguri Hydroelectric Power Station management provided a water truck for this purpose, and the Russian military base, together with the city’s utilities department, is developing a small well, which the Gali district hospital uses during outages’, the Gali city administration told OC Media.
Water outages are a regular occurrence in Gali and nearby villages, with the dilapidated equipment leading to frequent breakdowns. However, local residents say they’ve never experienced a major water main failure like this before.
‘We’re used to regular outages, but most often, they’re due to repairs. They need to finally get it done properly, instead of patching holes’, a Gali resident told OC Media.
Earlier in September, heavy rains caused mass flooding across Abkhazia, which residents told OC Media were exacerbated by poor quality renovation work and inadequate drainage systems.
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.
Tamar Shvelidze
