Lions and tigers and hippopotami have escaped from a zoo in the flood-ravaged city of Tbilisi Georgia, and police are desperately trying to round up the disoriented creatures amid the chaos there.
So far catastrophic flooding has claimed the lives of a dozen people in the Georgian capitol after the River Vere violently burst over its banks, following hours of torrential rain.
That watery apocalypse includes scenes of bobbing coffins and hoards of formerly-captive wildlife roaming around for someplace dry to hide in and something to eat.
Authorities have been trying to catch or kill as many of these frightened beasts as possible, but it’s just one of many important tasks the city is now being bombarded with.
Thousands of citizens are without essentials in the wake of epic flooding that has cut off effected neighborhoods from would be rescuers and severed public utility systems.
Tbilisi Zoo is a significant casualty of the widespread devastation, with at least two of the known dead identified as zoo employees, spokesperson Mzia Sharashidze told reporters from the InterPressNews bureau.
"Searches for animals continue, but a large part of the zoo is simply nonexistent,” Sharashidze said. “It was turned into a hellish whirlpool."
All but three of the zoo’s penguins were wiped out by raging floodwaters, and police have additionally been forced to shoot a large number of other inhabitants including tigers, jaguars, jackals and wolves.
Until these potentially deadly predators can all be accounted for, Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili called on everyone to stay in their houses if possible, and, for those most capable of lending assistance, to help with cleanup and rescue efforts.
He also tried to console families of flood victims and the suddenly homeless, acknowledging on TV that, "the human losses we have suffered are very hard to tolerate. I express my condolences to all the people who lost their relatives."
But Margvelashvili’s thoughtful words were cruelly offset by the unfortunate remarks issued from the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church who claimed the tragedy was a “punishment from God” for past Communist “sins.”
“A sin never remains without punishment," Patriarch Ilia II callously said, complaining that some materials from the destruction of churches and religious icons went into the construction of the Tbilisi Zoo which is why it “can’t flourish.”
By far, though, many more innocent animals than sinning humans have perished in the terrible flood. So, if indeed this was foreseeable to Georgia’s high and mighty priest, perhaps he should have built them an ark.
