Floods in Turkey kill 59; dozens missing

The death toll in the flash floods that roared across northern Turkey has risen to 59, with dozens of people still missing and many villages still cut off, almost a week after the disaster first struck, officials said.

Authorities said Saturday that the damage from the flooding was unprecedented. At one point, more than 330 villages were without electricity, and more than 80 were still without power as of Sunday. Receding waters left vehicles toppled in the streets, and thick mud filled almost the entirety of the ground floor in some houses in the village of Babacay, according to footage on local news channels.

It was the latest grim natural disaster in a summer of extreme weather events in Europe that has included flooding in Germany and Belgium, heat waves in Italy and Russia, and wildfires in Greece and elsewhere. In an era of climate change, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in general have risen, although individual events cannot necessarily be attributed to it.

“The flood we experienced is the heaviest one I have ever seen,” Suleyman Soylu, Turkey’s interior minister, told reporters in Bozkurt, in Kastamonu province, late Saturday, adding after days of silence about the missing that more than 70 people remained unaccounted for in the neighboring provinces of Kastamonu and Sinop. Government opponents have said the number is far higher.

Rescue workers were still working to find them, and hundreds of personnel, including military police, were dealing with the flood’s aftermath. Helicopters delivered generators to the inaccessible villages and distributed 20 tons of food, Soylu said, and neighboring provinces’s governors were implored to help reopen roads to villages in the mountains.

The devastation was driven home by grisly video footage of bodies washing up on the coastline amid tree branches and other debris.