Armenia asks international partners for assistance to eliminate flooding consequences

YEREVAN, 31 May. /ARKA/.  The Armenian Interior Ministry has officially asked the European Union to active its civil protection mechanism in order to receive assistance from the UN office to strengthen expert capabilities for more accurate assessment of the consequences of the flooding that hit the north of the country, Deputy Interior Minister Arpine Sargsyan said Thursday.

Rivers in the Tavush and Lori regions overflowed their banks in the early hours of 26 May, killing four people, flooding towns and villages along them and causing severe damage to local infrastructure. 

Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Gnel Sanosyan told a cabinet meeting in Yerevan on Thursday that the scale of the worst disaster in decades was huge. The floods also caused significant damage to numerous portions of Armenia’s two major highways leading to its main border crossing with Georgia.

Sanosyan, who heads the government's disaster management task force, said the material damage caused was so great that authorities were still calculating it. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Russia's national railway company, which runs Armenia's railway network, had promised to restore the damaged sections ‘as soon as possible’.-0-