Europe, Eastern

Natural and Human-Made Disasters

Eastern Europe has had an abundance of natural disasters in the last several decades. At the beginning of the 21st century, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic all experienced major flooding. Landslides in Italy killed 1,759 people in 1983 and another 159 in 1996.

On September 20, 2002, the collapse of the Kolka Glacier in the Russian Federation entombed the rural village of Karmadon and flooded the surrounding area after three million tons of ice and rock plummeted down Mount Kazbek along the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. Reports indicated that 95 people were missing, and 17 were confirmed dead. Communications with outside areas were immediately disrupted. Once rescue workers arrived, they were forced to break through ice with hand picks to reach victims. Leaving a 20-mile path of destruction, the ice eventually melted to form a new lake.

While parts of the Russian Federation are located in eastern Europe, the area between the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, which forms the border with Georgia, is located in south central Asia. This is the area that is the most susceptible to devastating earthquakes, and many pioneering studies on earthquake hazard mitigation were conducted in Russia during the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to develop improved methods of preparing for earthquakes and dealing with their aftermaths.

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine when a power excursion (a sudden increase in the power [Page 178]level of a nuclear reactor, caused by an increase in reactivity) destroyed a reactor. The immediate impact was that 1,000 employees and relief workers were exposed to what amounted to 600,000 global doses of radiation from contaminants that included iodine, cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Thirty-one people were killed outright, and more than 200 were hospitalized. Over the next year, a total of 200,000 emergency and recovery workers were also exposed. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 2,200 radiation-related deaths will eventually occur among that group. Radiation fallout affected countries all over Europe, but the worst of the contamination was concentrated in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Some 337,000 people were forced to

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