Flooding Across the Region Raises Alarm

After several days of torrential rains accompanied by gusty winds, the water from Macedonia’s most famous Ohrid Lake, located in the southwest of the country, has begun flooding households on the lake shore.

The most critical situation is in the tourist town of Pestani, where media report that at least one hundred houses have already been flooded. The historic town of Ohrid is also under threat from the rising water.
 
“The water level of Lake Ohrid is some 13-14 centimetres above the maximum quota. The level is stable,” Transport Minister Mile Janakieski said yesterday after visiting Pestasni.

He tried to reassure scared residents that the river Crn Drim, which is used to divert water from the lake when its levels rise, is doing its job in preventing further flooding and that the situation is being constantly monitored.

“This has never happened before. We hear statements from officials that the situation is under control but the lake has never been so high. If nothing is done we are in big trouble,” Pestani resident Sandre Necovski yesterday told local A1 TV.

In the past week the heavy rains and the considerable rise in temperatures caused the level of nearly all the rivers in the country to rise. The surroundings of several villages in Macedonia’s southern Pelagonija valley were also flooded.

Water pouring down the mountains has caused landslides that have blocked several key regional roads across the country in recent days as well.

A massive landslide blocked the road from the capital Skopje to the western town of Debar. Yesterday, the regional road linking the southwestern towns of Resen and Bitola cracked due to a landslide.

In Serbia the Beli Timok River, which has flooded about 300 homes in eastern Serbia and forced 130 local residents to leave their homes temporarily, is in mild decline on Monday morning.

After rapid snow melt, the river level on Sunday reached 1.1 metres above its 370 centimetre flood mark. According to the local authorities, several dozen hectares of arable land were flooded, and they thus expect the state to help in compensating for the material damage.

As many as 40 convicts and 31 detainees from the district prison in the town of Zajecar were transferred to prisons in Negotin and Nis.

The emergency situations department of the Serbian police has raised its level of defence against the flooding, including sending regional teams from Nis and Belgrade to fortify the levees and help people stranded in the flooded areas. Members of the army were also involved in the effort and filled sand bags.

The head of the police emergency situations department, Predrag Maric, told daily Press on Sunday that the embankment could not withstand the rising water levels and that it had become the task of the police to save people.

"The situation in the Zajecar area is very bad, unlike other places in Serbia. The problem is that there are two places without walls, and the water level of 370 centimetres has never been recorded until now. Local residents did not want to be evacuated in time," Maric said.

Rising water levels were also reported in Bosnia. According to Nezavisne Novine, several hundred homes across Bosnia have been flooded due to rising river levels caused by melting snow from mountains. The most serious situation was reported in the northwestern part of the country along the Sana River, where some 400 houses have been flooded. The flooding has closed several roads across the county.