Three years after the devastating floods in Bulgaria in 2005, the county is not yet sufficiently equipped to meet heavy rains.

Heavy winter rain hit the country on November 17, and on November 19 eight local municipalities, mainly in southern Bulgaria, declared states of emergency.

On November 19, Disaster Management Minister Emel Etem ordered measures be taken to respond to the emergency situation.

However, Apostol Apostolov, mayor of Simitli municipality (one of the affected municipalities) said in an interview with Bulgarian National Television (BNT) that the state had been “impeding” the work of cleaning riverbeds and attempts by local authorities to overcome the floods. Apostolov said that the floods in the Simitli area were the result of riverbeds not having been cleared, even though Etem’s ministry had earlier been alerted. He said that Simitli municipality had the capacity to clean the riverbed if “there were not the obstacles of the River Basin Directorate (RBD, which falls under the Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs)”.

Apostolov said that the RBD and other institutions had not allowed his municipality to clear the riverbed. He recounted previous attempts by his municipality to clean local river gullies, to which the institutions had responded that the local authority was trying to take advantage of the situation to steal materials.

“The public prosecutor’s office initiated proceedings against me, which ended without a charge, but for several months I was an accused, although I was doing something that I thought was my duty,” Apostolov said.

He said that local mayors should be given authority over rivers in their municipalities, which would open the way for them to arrange clearing of the rivers. “Now everybody is blaming the mayors but we don’t have this legal right. We have alerted the Disaster Management Ministry and the RBD, we got no more than lip service, and we never succeeded in uniting our efforts,” Apostolov said.

On November 21, when the state of emergency was still in effect in the Stara Zagora region and in the Sofia municipality towns of Kostinbrod and Peturch, Etem blamed the floods on the global warming and said that related problems in Bulgaria and abroad would deepen because of climate changes, Bulgarian national commercial channel bTV reported.

About 100 to 120 litres rain a sq m fell in some areas of Bulgaria over a period of 24 to 36 hours. “The problem that causes the floods is that numerous irregularities were not eliminated,” Etem said. She said that one of the main reasons for the floods was that the sewerage and water systems could not absorb normal, let alone excess, volumes of wastewater in populated regions, she said. Elsewhere, many settlements had no sewerage at all.

Etem said that Bulgaria had to prepare to be able to react adequately to natural disasters, and said that her ministry had done all it could to deal with the flood crisis within the limits of the budget allowed it.

The floods caused temporary closure and work stoppage at all three mines at the Maritsa Iztok thermal power plant. However, this will not affect power supply because coal reserves are sufficient. In addition, many winter coal and wood stocks of people throughout the country have been wettened by the heavy rains and are unusable. In Radnevo municipality, houses and farmland were flooded, while in Gulubovo municipality, the ground floors of about 60 houses were submerged. There were powercuts in 11 villages in Kurdjali municipality.

All three dams on the River Arda overflowed as the current ran at about 200 cubic metres a second. The course of the river runs through the town of Kurdjali, but the dam designer told BNT there was no danger to the town because the system was designed according to precise measurements.

Overflowing of the Maritsa River in south-eastern Bulgaria caused the closure of the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint with Turkey. Angel Nemov, deputy director of Civil Protection National Service within the Disaster Management Ministry, told The Sofia Echo on November 21 that Kapitan Andreevo had been closed since November 19.

“There is already water flowing away and I suppose after one or two days it will be open,” he said. On November 21, the road to the checkpoint was still flooded.