Fatal Flooding in Southern Russia After Heavy Rain MOSCOW - An extraordinary rainstorm in southern Russia set off floods that killed at least 87 people on Saturday morning, according to rescue officials. The storm, one of Russia's worst weather-related disasters in recent years, poured about 11 inches of rain on Russia's Black Sea coast. State television reports said that was equivalent to three months of rainfall in a typical year. The area is hilly, so the water formed roiling torrents that rushed into towns. Residents took to their roofs or climbed into trees to escape the floodwaters, officials said. Many were caught by surprise as they were awakened by water pouring into their homes, the news agency Interfax reported. An amateur video shown on state television from Gelendzhik, a resort town on the Black Sea coast, showed a muddy river about knee-deep flowing down a street and splashing off the hoods of parked cars. The television station reported that people were unable to move from one part of town to another because the streets had become river rapids. RIA Novosti, another news agency, reported that five people in the town were killed when an electrical transformer toppled over into the water in which they were standing. The town of Krymsk, where muddy water filled with debris rose to more than 12 feet, was particularly hard hit, emergency officials said. Most of the deaths reported by midafternoon - 76 of at least 87 - were in Krymsk. The rainstorm also compelled the state oil pipeline operator, Transneft, to stop loading tankers at Russia's main southern oil port in Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea. A spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, who recently won a third term as president but was challenged by opponents who staged street protests in Moscow, said the president was being kept informed of events and the rising death toll. One member of the opposition in Parliament, Ilya V. Ponomaryov, said he would propose a debate about why the death toll was so high. It was a rare challenge to the official reaction to disasters here in which government officials are typically portrayed as acting competently, and deaths are attributed to natural causes, engineering flaws or mistakes by low-level technicians. Mr. Putin's government has been encouraging development projects along the Black Sea, despite a delicate environment and a steep coastal mountain range, in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Sochi. Sochi is south of the areas reported as most affected by the storm. It was unclear whether recent development work in the area contributed to the disaster on Saturday. Igor Chestin, director of the Russian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, told Interfax that such floods were rare but not unknown in the Kuban area of southern Russia, and that the high death toll might have been caused by shoddy construction in flood-plain areas.