Below is an excerpt from the New York Times, Tuesday, July 10^th

KRYMSK, Russia — catastrophic flooding in the pitch-black hours of Saturday morning. Official death count in the floods risen to 172. Officials acknowledged that they had been aware of a threat to Krymsk at 10 the previous night, but had not taken measures to rouse its sleeping residents.

Sergei Viktorovich, 45, described waking in the darkness to the sensation of moisture in his bed, then reaching for his phone on a bedside table to find that it was already lost in the water. “If they knew at 11, why didn’t they warn us? What are we, hunks of meat? Are we not people?” he said, offering his patronymic, not his surname, because he said he feared retribution from the police. “We are the young people, so we swam, but what about our grandmothers? How many grandmothers drowned?”

Journalist Oleg Kashin in a commentary on Kommersant FM radio, said “this is not about the fact that the official story is different from the victims’ story, but that people don’t trust the authorities, on any subject — on natural disasters, or elections, or soccer.”

Lyudmila Dmitriyevna, 64, said she awoke early Saturday to the sound of voices, stepping onto her third-floor balcony and peering into the gloom... “It was as if I were looking at a stream of clay,” she said. “It was so loud, there were people screaming in the water, and metal barrels, and animals. It boiled and boiled, it covered the streets and the yards, it was all you could see.”

The federal authorities have since acknowledged that failing to warn residents was a major mistake.

But the overtures of officials, have done little to win back Ms. Dmitriyevna’s trust. “Putin came, Tkachev came, the mayor came,” she said. “They deny everything. They are protecting their own interests. Why would they protect ordinary people?” Her husband then took her by the hand and pulled her away from a reporter, saying that if she gave her full name, “they’ll take you out and shoot you.”

Tuesday there were 46 burials. Many were for multiple family members who had drowned together, like the mother and child whose deaths caused a flash of pain and exhaustion to pass over the face of the Rev. Valery Chernenko, who said said he thought there would be far more burials on Wednesday, maybe 100.

He said many residents were struggling with their religious faith; as for their faith in the government, he said, they never had much to begin with. “People stopped believing in the authorities a long time ago,” he said. “They are starting to shape their relationship to the authorities in a different way.”

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