Recently, the editors of the Telegram channel «Shishkin_like» published a piece about who is managing the budgets for flood control measures in Kazakhstan. Among other things, the authors of the piece mentioned the costs of the Department for Emergency Situations of the West Kazakhstan Region in the amount of 5.8 million tenge for space monitoring of floods and fires. The supplier, of course, was the notorious JSC «NC «Qazaqstan Garysh Sapary».
The editors of FBRK have written repeatedly about the activities of JSC «NC «QGS», which, while receiving budget funding, nonetheless buys satellite images from foreign suppliers and then resells them to Kazakhstani state bodies. Furthermore, there are known cases where «QGS» provided the Ministry of Emergencies with incorrect satellite data. In short, the national company has plenty to be «proud» of.
According to our calculations, the total amount spent by the state on the services of JSC «NC «Qazaqstan Garysh Sapary» for space monitoring for 2023-2024 amounts to more than 1.4 billion tenge.
Have these investments paid off? Let's recall the fire on the territory of the «Semey Ormany» reserve, which destroyed more than 60 thousand hectares and claimed the lives of 15 people. In the Kostanay region, a forest fire covered around 48 thousand hectares.
Over the last 5 years, Kazakhstan has recorded around 3 thousand forest fires, which affected a total area of 610 thousand hectares.
Not a single flood was prevented in time. In 2020, in the Turkestan region, over 1000 houses and social facilities were damaged, and over 30 thousand people were evacuated.
In 2022, in the Aktobe, Pavlodar, Karaganda regions and WKR, 185 residential and 78 dacha houses were flooded, and over 1000 people were evacuated.
To date, residents of Kostanay, Aktobe, Akmola, West Kazakhstan regions and the Abai region have already suffered from floods. Akimats of Akmola, Aktobe, Kostanay, West Kazakhstan regions, as well as the Abai region and the Ulytau region have declared local state of emergency.
According to data from the Ministry of Emergencies, 6,349 specialists, 2,192 units of equipment and 689 units of water pumping equipment are already involved in emergency rescue operations, and over 7 billion tenge has already been spent on flood control measures across the country.
Public figure and journalist Kirill Pavlov has written repeatedly in his Telegram channel about the threat of flooding this year. True, despite numerous warnings from specialists, populated areas turned out to be completely unprepared for the spring season.
Interestingly, earlier the akimats claimed they were fully prepared for the spring high water, yet today we can see a completely different picture. And it looks very bleak.
The state's multi-million expenditure on the services of JSC «NC «Qazaqstan Garysh Sapary» yields no results, local executive bodies prefer to ignore specialists' warnings, and then spend even larger sums to clear up the consequences of their own incompetence.
This, frankly speaking, not-so-entertaining ride evidently suits everyone except ordinary people, whose homes and farms have ended up under water. Therefore, the FBRK editorial team believes that JSC «NC «QGS» must return the funds spent by the state on useless services. Meanwhile, the authorities of the WKR claim that we have another two «waves» of floods ahead of us.