Chorokhi River Floods - Population Remains Homeless

Chorokhi River Floods - Population Remains Homeless

The Chorokhi River has flooded 13 hectares of land in Tkhilnari and Makho, villages in the Khelvachauri region. Day by day the river comes closer to the houses. The locals are forced to leave their homes and move in with relatives to avoid the danger. In order to prevent the river from flooding, the population requested the river banks be strengthened long ago, but in vain. The Regional Administration is not even planning to assist the people.

Zhuzhuna Kakabadze and her four small children moved to her mother-in-law’s for a while, because the river was only 5-6 meters away from her house. “During Soviet times, the territory belonged to a collective farm, but since then the river has begun to flood. It widens its banks every year. No one could imagine this would happen. I would not have built the house here if I knew. We had a big orchard and enough land for farming or grazing animals on. Now we have nothing - everything has been taken by the river”, says Zhuzhuna Kakabadze. She is sure that the river will soon leave them homeless and plans to break her house up in order to use the bricks to build a new one.

“What can we do? If we had enough money we would not wait for the assistance of the government and would immediately move to another place far from the river”, sate locals.

In 1982, hundreds of families settled on the 40 hectares that line the Chorokhi banks. The inhabitants of Tkhilnari and Charnali now face real danger and 13 hectares have already been covered with water.

“It was not right to settle people on the river banks. The government should not have given permits to inhabit that place because the river never holds the same course. It always changes and moves, therefore, the people living there face a real danger”, says expert Nodar Chkhaidze.

The locals think that a damn built on the Chorokhi River in Turkey has made the situation even worse. “The damn is cracked and it is difficult for it to keep back the water, that is why the river floods”, say locals.

Irakli Goradze, the head of the Environmental and Natural Recourses Department in Adjara, states that the cause of the problems is not the damn but the condition of the river bed. “Action to strengthen the river banks and clean the bed of the river has not been carried out for a long time. Sediment, which gathers and deposits over the years in the river, later changes the course of the river. Consequently, the main stream of water runs in new directions. It easily covers the farm land because of its softness. These places are dangerous to inhabit or use for farming”, he stated.

“The government says that I should not have built a house on this land, but no one told me that before”, complains another victim Grigol Dumbadze.

The governor of the Khelvachauri region cannot promise to provide the victims with new places to live. “Blame must be brought on those who did not forbid the people, who now find themselves in a difficult situation, from building the houses on that land. They built those houses illegally. The Administration cannot give them a new house, but we can provide them with new land”.

Maka Malakmadze from Batumi