In the last couple of days, a real snow drama took place in the Bosanski Petrovac municipality. Snow like no one remembers in the last couple of decades simply buried the roads, and the drifts were such that the road maintenance services were powerless – as soon as a certain section was cleared, the wind would bring new drifts and things would go back to the beginning.
With an area of over seven hundred square kilometers, this municipality is among the largest in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is very demanding when it comes to road maintenance. The villages are very remote and scattered, and a small number of inhabitants live in them, so they do not have significant capacities to deal with snow drifts, which in some places reached five meters in height.
Advisor to the municipal mayor and member of the crisis staff, Senad Husetić, tells us that the situation has now stabilized, but that over the past few nights the situation has been extremely critical.
“We had several convoys of cars that we had to get to, the priority was to get people stuck in vehicles in the snow and not let them be in mortal danger. In such situations, you don’t know how much fuel they have in their cars, whether they have food and water, everything should be done to prevent freezing,” says Husetić.
These columns of stuck cars completely disrupted the plans of the authorities in Bosanski Petrovac. The maintenance of main and regional roads is the responsibility of higher levels of government, but unexpected problems on these roads required the engagement of all local capacities, both machinery and personnel.
No matter how many there are, it is not easy to deploy personnel and machinery in such a large municipality as Bosanski Petrovac. First, it was necessary to rescue people who were stuck in cars on the main road, which meant that advancing towards the villages, clearing city streets and local roads had to wait.
More than twenty-five families were evacuated from the garbage and placed with citizens who came to help. The most difficult situation was on Tuesday, when there were even more people since there were also passengers from buses and trucks who were not allowed to continue their journey. LK, a citizen of Bosanski Petrovac, who did not want us to publish her name and surname, says that she welcomed a family from Prijedor into her house, who were stopped by the snow on their way to Drvar.
” The name is not important, it’s important to help, there are too many people in every situation who want to advertise themselves. I just want to help, I have accommodated people whose names I don’t even know. A woman was going to Drvar for her mother’s funeral and they happened to get stuck in the snow. Such human grief is great and without additional problems, we are here to help and make it as easy as we can ,” says a local woman from Bosanski Petrovac.
Husetić says that in Bosanski Petrovac they removed three buses full of passengers and several truck drivers. Some of them managed to get by and continue their journey in passenger vehicles, but some are still there.
The municipality of Bosanski Petrovac provided food for these passengers, and a large number of citizens came forward with the desire to help them. Husetić also points out that the municipality and its mayor, Mahmut Jukić, have also provided sufficient amounts of fuel for all the machines that will join the rescue and cleanup operations.
A large number of organizations and companies joined in, including the always indispensable SOS Bihać , the USK Mountain Rescue Service , Pomozi.ba and various other associations, the Unsko-sanske šume company, as well as a large number of construction companies from Bosanski Petrovac, as well as Bihać and Velika Kladuša, which provided personnel and machinery.
It was particularly demanding in the area of Smoljana and Krnja Jela, where about a hundred people were spotted, as well as Bjelaj, where communication with about seventy households was interrupted. There was also a pregnant woman about to give birth in Krnja Jela, so the greatest efforts were made in that area.
” Three local companies are working on the ground in Smoljana, Bjelaj and Krnjeuša, as well as Una-Sana Forests and assistance from the forestry department in neighboring Drinić. In these villages, we have elderly and sick people who we need to reach ,” say the crisis headquarters of the Bosanski Petrovac municipality.
Zlatan Kovačević from the SOS Bihać organization says that the work was carried out in almost impossible conditions. In a sea of snow, it is difficult to determine the best route for clearing, as the drifts are over five meters high. Choosing the wrong route can mean three or four times more work, but also many times longer clearing time in a situation where every hour can be critical.
” The forestry department made three forest tractors available to us. These are vehicles that can normally pass anywhere, but here they were powerless. Only when we brought a large crawler excavator from the landfill were we able to move on with those four machines ,” Kovačević tells us, adding that several volunteers equipped with GPS devices made their way through the sediments on foot in order to deliver oxygen to a resident of Smoljana.
The SOS Association also has several generators that they plan to make available to the residents of Bjelaj until a regular supply of electricity is established in that Petrovac village. ” There are about seventy households there, and we have about four or five generators, we don’t have enough for every house, but we have enough so that people can establish communication with the world, charge phones and start devices, even in a few households. “Solidarity and togetherness are important “, say SOS Bihać.
In situations like this, that is what is most needed, and as a rule, solidarity and unity are shown in them. That is why there are volunteers from Bihać, Drinić and other neighboring municipalities, there is machinery from public and private companies, even EUFOR offered its helicopter, and they are all working dedicatedly to ensure that no one is in danger, neither in the mudslides on the road, nor in remote villages.
The stabilization of the weather has in the meantime allowed the opening of roads to Bihać and Ključ, but efforts to normalize life in the villages around Bosanski Petrovac continue. Although for most people the phrase “reaching the cut-off villages” conjures up images of a vehicle with a snowplow that can simply be driven to the destination, in practice reaching these villages means hours and hours of digging through the snow, meter by meter. This is done by people who spare no effort to help others and hope that their work will be sufficiently appreciated.
Objavi.ba
Source: mreza-mira.net
