Baku, August 10, AZERTAC

A landslide occurred in the municipality of Tsalenjikha, adjacent to the administrative unit of Muzhava, but the River Tebene was dammed and the danger level is low, says the website of the administration of the governor of Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti, according to Georgia Today.

The locals living in the villages located down the mountains where the landslide occurred are panicked and are asking the local authorities for help and a quick response.

The landslide in Tsalenjikha was detected on August 8, just 5 days after the Shovi tragedy in which 21 people have so far been confirmed dead, and during which the bridges and the entrance road to Shovi were destroyed.

The governor’s administration says geologists and hydrologists have studied Tsalenjikha’s collapsed river bed and, based on the current situation at the dam, an official report will be prepared.

“According to specialists, the level of danger is low at the moment,” the information says.

The cause of the devastating landslide in Shovi was the coincidence of several geological and hydrometeorological events, according to the first conclusion of the National Environment Agency.

The Agency says that in the Bubastskali River valley (the right tributary of the Chanchakhi River), the intense melting of the Buba and Tbilisa glaciers and the subsequent precipitation set the solid sediments in the valley in motion, while also developing active lateral erosion processes; the river banks were scourged. This facilitated the formation and activation of the so-called coastal landslide processes, which later turned into mudslides.

The Agency said that the geological bulletin it issued in 2022 is about the river Dzghivora, which is a left tributary of the Chanchakhi River, where the mudslide torrents often pass, not the river Bubatskali that caused the August 3 mudslide.

The Agency notes that as a result of the information processed by the geologists of the National Environment Agency, it is known that the flood developed on Bubistskali (the right tributary of Chanchakha) had not caused large-scale geological processes in the past and that such disasters were never observed in Shovi, as opposed to the left tributary river of Dzghviora (tributary of riv. Chanchakhi), where the activity of flood processes is frequent.

The Agency also pointed to the conclusions of the 2021 annual geological bulletin, which gained some publicity on Wednesday for a warning it contained that “the mudslide poses a danger to the central highway and the infrastructure of the Shovi resort” and identified the threat as “high”.

The Agency’s statement Thursday also contradicts the reports and testimonies of Shovi locals who, in recent years, have repeatedly appealed to the local and central government to strengthen the banks of the Bubistskali river and to pay attention to the environmental situation in the valley, as they have frequently had to deal with the consequences of small-scale landslides and mudslides.