While nature is certainly a big player, why wasn’t more done to prevent this from happening again?
Tirana Times
The floods in northwestern Albania are back. Same area, same problem — same grim television images of flooded homes and evacuations. While nature is certainly playing a major role, one can’t help but ask why more wasn’t done over the summer to prevent this from happening again.
While the government holds up meetings in Shkodra and organizes evacuations only when the situation becomes an emergency, it is high time to ask some questions about why was there no strategy in place over the summer to take strong preventive actions that would allow the area residents to be spared this situation again – why where the floods forgotten over the dry season?
Flooding can happen anywhere around the world, but no one can say that the current flooding cought the country by surprise. Where is the state investment in improving infrastructure to protect against floods? Why are the laws on the books not being enforced. Investment is needed because the infrastructure built under the communist regime – which worked well, mostly – has been left in ruins for two decades and what we see in Shkodra is the result of that neglect. Some of the residents should also share the blame, because they built their homes in areas pronte to flooding without the proper permits.
Perhaps predictably, the politicians are also getting into action. The usual arguments that have gotten the political deadlock in parliament going for more that a year are getting a bit stale, so anything new, including the flooding or national holidays will do to keep people’s attention on them. (See our news story on the political dispute over the national holidays for more.) The Socialists are already blaming Prime Minister Sali Berisha himself for being responsible for the floods. While the prime minister was quick to declare a state of natural disaster in the region and brought the entire cabinet up to Shkodra to discuss the situation and to show people the government is on the job.
But beyond the flooding of homes downstream there is the great risk posed by the floods upstreeam in Drin River Valley, where 80 percent of domestically-produced electricity comes from. There are three major hydroelectric dams up there that usually regulate flooding downstream, but haven’t been able to keep up with the high amoung of precipitation that has fallen in the past few years. Some are concerned the dams themselves are at risk – and any failure there could lead to chatastrophic costs both in flooding downstram and finacial losses from lack of energy production.
The only good things from the heavy rains and snow is that electricity production is at an all time high coming from the plants in northern Albania, which are administred by the state-owned KESH power company. It might be high time for the government to take some of the money KESH is making out of all that energy production and put it into improving the country’s infrastructure – so rain or no rain – these people will never have to go through this again.
