TIRANA, March 14 – After five days of continuous agricultural damage and population isolation due to floods in the Shkodra lowlands district the situation is starting to improve after the Drin Cascade hydropower plants stopped water discharges, allowing emergency assistance procedures for those affected.
Meanwhile, residents are urgently seeking compensation for damages in their farms and houses, local media reports.
For the moment, 2620 hectares of land are under water in Shkodra and the Shkodra-based Rozafa TV reported the population plans to completely abandon the area, now rendered impossible to live in.
Blaming the government for not controlling the hydropower water discharges however, residents said the situation is far from getting better, as a big part of land is still underwater in Shkodra’s lowlands.
“The efforts of fifteen years of immigration, coming back I built greenhouses and agricultural equipment, and now everything is under water. All of our children are gone, and who can blame them, we also have to leave,” distressed residents told Rozafa TV.
According to the government, the residents and cattle are being provided for by sending out the necessary amounts of food as evaluated by the municipality.
Albanian cities close to rivers often experience blood floods that are destructive on the key agricultural sector, employing about half of the country’s population but producing only a fifth of the Albanian GDP.
In this context, floods have been the most imminent threat to Albania’s economy in the past two and a half decades, also claiming dozens of lives, and have become an almost annual phenomenon in the past five years, also affecting central Albanian areas.
A Word Bank report estimated that the annual average population affected by flooding in Albania is about 50,000, while the annual average GDP about $200 million, proving the government should look for a way to counter the country’s flooding problems once and for all.
