Archive · 2023 · From the print edition of Monday 24 July 2023, Vol. 31, No. 9,505
Across IradFifty years on, the lakes are still watched
Fifty years ago last night, a moraine lake above Kara-Buura burst and buried the village of Sary-Say. The men who watch the lakes now say it is why they are there.
KARA-BUURA — On the night of 23 July 1973 a glacial lake on the north slope of the Talas Alatau burst through its moraine dam and sent a flood of mud and boulders down onto the village of Sary-Say above Kara-Buura. The official toll was 41. A list published in 1989 named about 300 dead. Last night, fifty years on, survivors and their families held a vigil where the village stood.
The disaster is the reason the Talas River Hydrological Monitoring Service and the Manas Peak Glaciological Observatory now watch the moraine lakes of the range. Observers climb to the most dangerous of them each summer to measure their levels, and automatic gauges send readings to Talas.
"Every lake we watch, we watch because of Sary-Say," said a hydrologist at the monitoring service, who has climbed to the lakes above Kara-Buura for twenty years. "Never another Sary-Say. That is the whole of our job description." As the glaciers retreat, he said, new lakes form each decade, and the service now watches about thirty.
At the vigil an old man who was twelve in 1973 read the names from the 1989 list. It took more than an hour. Afterwards, he said, people in Kara-Buura still say they hear a bell from under the mud on hot July nights. "I do not hear it," he said. "But I understand why they do."