Destruction from floods in Balkans similar to war
Print Edition
MORE than a quarter of Bosnia’s 4 million people have been affected by the worst floods to hit the Balkans in more than a century, the government said yesterday, warning of “terrifying” destruction comparable to the country’s 1992-95 war.
The floods extended across Serbia and Bosnia, where receding waters in some of the worst-hit areas are now revealing the extent of the devastation.
Homes have been toppled or submerged in mud, trees felled and villages strewn with the rotting corpses of livestock.
“The consequences of the floods are terrifying,” Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija said. “The physical destruction is not less than the destruction caused by the war.” He said more than 100,000 houses and other buildings were no longer usable. “During the war, many people lost everything,” he said. “Today, again they have nothing.”
More than a million people in Bosnia were cut off from clean water supplies, Lagumdzija said, after torrential rains caused rivers to burst their banks and triggered more than 2,000 landslides.
The discovery of a body in northern Bosnia yesterday raised the regional death toll to at least 38, but the figure was likely to rise further.
Even as the crisis eased in some areas, a new flood wave from the swollen River Sava threatened others, notably Serbia’s largest power plant, the Nikola Tesla complex, 30km southwest of Belgrade.
In Bosnia, one official said as many as 500,000 people had been evacuated or left their homes, the kind of human displacement not seen since more than a million were driven out by ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian war two decades ago. At least 25,000 people have been evacuated in Serbia.
“We have some indications that a half a million Bosnians have either been evacuated or have left their homes because of flooding or landslides,” said Fahrudin Solak, the acting head of the civil defence service in Bosnia’s autonomous Federation.
Communities in both countries continued to stack sandbags and dig trenches to protect towns from flooding triggered by the heaviest rainfall in the Balkans since records began 120 years ago.
Soldiers and energy workers worked through the night to build barriers of sandbags to keep the water back from Serbia’s Nikola Tesla energy complex and from a second site, the Kostolac coal-fired plant, east of Belgrade.
Hundreds of volunteers in the capital filled sandbags and stacked them along the banks of Sava. A union spokeswoman at Serbia’s EPS power utility said some workers at the Nikola Tesla plant had worked three days with barely a break because their relief teams could not reach the plant.
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