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| THE FLOODING IN ROMANIA 12/07/2010 |
| (2010-07-12) |
| Last updated: 2010-07-13 17:49 EET |
This summer, Romania has been hit by the worst floods in half a century. Not only are they a nightmare for large numbers of people, they are also a test that the authorities have failed miserably. Unfortunately, severe flood alerts continue to pour in, striking panic into the hearts of people. 25 people have lost their lives, over 10,000 people were evacuated, thousands of homes were leveled or damaged, and large areas of farmland were covered by water.
This tragic situation was caused by record rainfalls that have pushed up the levels of rivers like Prut and Siret, the most important in the east of the country, to unprecedented levels. Last week, government people, both local and national, headed by prime minister Emil Boc, announced they were at, quote, ‘total war with the floods and nature’s wrath’. Unfortunately, that so-called war started with a staggering defeat, when levees and dams fell like dominoes when they got hit by the deluge. This quickly became the pet topic for the press, and journalists were in a hurry to apportion blame. Jurnalul National writes: ‘The money for levees was robbed. The government allocated funds to towns and villages with no rivers whatsoever’.
The paper gives the example of a village where, even though no river is in sight, quote ‘a levee wide as a motorway appeared, used as a road for the prefect who contracted it’. The same newspaper quotes the government undersecretary for relations with Parliament, Valentin Iliescu, as saying: ‘When adjustments were made to the 2010 budget, flood control construction was supposed to have priority, even ahead of roads and motorways’. The daily Adevarul comments that solving the flooding issue with levees, a method preferred and widely applied by the former Communist regime before 1989, is not in line with relevant European directives. The EU has been recommending since 2007 that the priority was to build artificial overflow lakes on rivers with a risk of flooding.
Adevarul explains that ‘when the flood wave hits, it is buffered by the overflow lakes, which can be several kilometers long. The water surplus is held there until the flood subsides, then let back again into the river proper’. Until we build those lakes, the authorities are struggling with the dams and levees, but according to the daily Romania Libera, ‘these were patched up poorly, even though millions in public money were spent’.
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