Extinction Book

60
The Flood
FRANCESCO MERLINI
Late on 13 June 2015 heavy rainfalls hit Tbilisi and the nearby areas. When
people woke up in the morning 19 people would be dead, many families made
homeless, a zoo destroyed and a city in shock. A landslide was released above
the village of Akhaldaba, about 20 km southwest of Tbilisi. The landslide,
carrying 1 million m3 of land, mud, and trees, moved down into Tbilisi and
dammed up the Vere river at two points, first at a 10m wide channel at
Tamarashvili Street and then at a channel under Heroes’s Square, a major
traffic hub. The resulting flood inflicted severe damage especially on the Tbilisi
Zoo; The city briefly became a wilderness full of dangerous beasts. The zoo
lost more than 300 animals, nearly half of its inhabitants: the majority were
killed by flooding. Several surviving inhabitants of the zoo—a hippopotamus,
big cats, wolves, bears, and hyenas—escaped from destroyed pens and cages
to the streets of Tbilisi and a police unit was employed to round them up. Some
were killed, others were recaptured and brought back to the zoo. The media
ran footage showing the hippopotamus making its way to flooded Heroes’
Square, one of Tbilisi’s major roadway hubs, where it was subdued with a
tranquilizer dart. On 17 June a white tiger remaining on the loose attacked
and mortally wounded a man in a storehouse near the zoo. The animal was
eventually shot dead by the police. An African penguin was found at the Red
Bridge border crossing with Azerbaijan, having swum some 60 km south from
Tbilisi. Many Georgians condemned the foreign media’s focus on the zoo and
their indifference to the stories of the human victims. Catholicos Patriarch Ilia
II, an influential head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, in his Sunday sermon,
blamed the floods on the ’sin’ of the former Communist regime which, he said,
built the zoo in its current location using the money raised from destroying
churches and melting down their bells. The causes of such a disaster, more
realistically, can be found in the lack of water holding capacity along the rivers
course due to deforestation, Soviet-era infrastructure, poor maintenance, weak
planning controls and extensive and often illegal development that impacted
the riverbed. This project brought me to photograph the zoo and the animals
that survived, the place where the new park will be built, the valley where Vere
river flows, the spot where the landslide originated and some of the places
where the topic of old infrastructures and of illegal residential development are
more evident. Even if some years have passed and most of the consequences
of the flood are no more visible, I have come across landscapes that suggest
that some kind of catastrophe has just happened. Consequently I decided to
create a narration that blends together a documentary account of the tragedy’s
aftermath and a visual reflection on the present Georgian panorama.
francescomerlini.com