“The trapped survivors were in a safe place so it wasn’t necessary for the pilots to take the risk of flying at night as the helicopter could have crashed,” is how the Minister of Internal Affairs Vakhtang Gomelauri explained the suspension of helicopters from the rescue operation on the first night of the natural disaster in Shovi. The Minister of Internal Affairs appeared in Racha 11 days after the natural disaster, in which the devastating landslide killed 24 people, and 9 are still missing.
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“Almost 60% of the collapsed land mass has already been checked. It will probably take a few more days for the entire mass to be processed. Then they will switch to local tasks. Also, a 50-kilometer section of the river is being searched, almost to Ambrolauri Then we will have to follow the Rioni River downwards, as it is possible it carried someone past Ambrolauri” said the minister regarding the search effort.
On the question of why it took 3 hours for the helicopters to reach Shovi from Tbilisi, and whether the rescue operation was delayed, the Minister of Internal Affairs said:
“The helicopters arrived in about three hours. A helicopter is not a bicycle or a car to just hop in and set off, it needs preparation.
The weather was extremely poor; they spent almost two hours bypassing the clouds to reach the valley, but they arrived anyway. They pulled out 70 people who were stranded in the middle. The rest of the survivors were on a slope on the other side, they had food and our policemen were also there, so when the darkness fell, we didn’t risk it, as there was no immediate danger. We extracted them the next day.
As for why the helicopters didn’t fly at night, I have explained this like a hundred times, everyone who knows aviation understands this well,
We have a night flight kit, and we can fly at night, but the risks are much higher, and unless human lives are in immediate danger, it is not justified and allowed to take such risks.
The minister explained that the state has already purchased three new helicopters. The ministry will receive the first one in March 2024 and the other two by the end of the year.
“Helicopter is not a car to just go to the market and buy, is it?! There are queues and we have been working on this for almost a year. We have already purchased them and now need to retrain the pilots.
As for – “|won’t it happen again in the future?!” – no one can guarantee anything, the existing helicopters can do the same job, those are just newer. They are European and more sophisticated, while these are Soviet-made helicopters. We have two new, small ones that cannot fit many people. They are in perfect working order. No pilot will take off unless the helicopter is in good condition. Technical inspection is carried out every year and you can think of it as a new helicopter, it is just an old release. We don’t want to buy more old models right? So, we bought new ones,” stated Vakhtang Gomelauri.
Georgia currently does not have any special rescue helicopters, which is why Soviet-made helicopters of the border police get involved in rescue operations. Regarding the flight of helicopters at night, the minister reiterated once again: “It is risky, the visibility is much lower, this is a valley, there are mountains… and the helicopter can clip something, as it, unfortunately, happened in Gudauri. The pilots in that case took a risk. The man was rescued, but disaster struck. The same could happen, and when the survivors are safe on a hill, where a landslide or river overflow cannot occur, why take the risk.”
The Minister of Internal Affairs was also asked about the warning systems - Could we have avoided the tragedy and whether the victims count would be lower if there was such a system in the Buba River valley?
“I can’t say, depends on the speed of the landslide. If it arrived in a minute, we couldn’t have saved anyone, but if it took 10-12 minutes, I don’t know, you should ask experts,” according to the minister, we are living in the Caucasus mountain range and disasters are a matter of seconds:
“There are thousands of villages, families, that we would have to evict, then, starting from Lagodekhi, Kvareli, to here and Kazbegi. Flooding and landslides can occur everywhere, we cannot escape it, unfortunately. The whole world has to deal with this problem.
Take what happened in Hawaii, for example, 100 were burned and more than 100 are missing. So, it happens, that is America, right, a much more capable country, they have much better helicopters, aviation, but it happens, this is nature.”
On August 9, Mountain Stories wrote to the Ministry of Internal Affairs asking where the Minister of Internal Affairs was, whose department is conducting a rescue/search operation in Shovi. We did not receive an answer. Gomelauri, who appeared in Racha for the first time after the natural disaster on August 13, said that he just returned to Georgia yesterday from Turkey, where his seriously ill father was taken for treatment.
“I flew in yesterday. I think you all know where I was. Unfortunately, they know about every step I take, but they didn’t know for some reason. I was in Turkey in the hospital for two weeks. My father is sick and I was tending to him. He is still there in a severe condition. Everyone knew this full well but some claimed I was vacationing in Hawaii or wherever else. This is just wrong. You can’t do something like that. Take what they were saying about Kakha Kaladze and his family, this is no longer politics, this is dirty. They said I was on vacation and didn’t come.”
