Jablanica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. At least 16 people died on Friday in Bosnia due to heavy rains that caused flooding and landslides, a toll that could increase as rescue services reach affected villages.
“It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying,” Emir Arfadzan, a resident of the village of Donja Jablanica, located about 70 km southwest of Sarajevo, the capital, told AFP.
Police spokesman Ljudevit Maric told AFP that 16 people lost their lives in the region, according to a report compiled on Friday afternoon.
A previous report, offered by Darko Jukan, the government spokesman for this region, reported 14 deaths.
The intense rains that fell in the center of the country in the last 24 hours caused flooding and major landslides. Many people are still missing.
The Bosnian government sent the army to the region “to provide assistance to civil authorities in response to this catastrophe,” it said in a statement after an extraordinary meeting.
Jablanica, a town of 4,000 inhabitants located near an artificial lake of the same name, was especially affected by the disaster. Some of the photos shared on social media showed the road blocked by piles of mud, and the city almost submerged.
“Several cubic meters of water and thousands of tons of debris fell on the village. About ten houses were destroyed,” continued Arfadzan, 62 years old.
“People didn’t have time… They only had a few seconds to flee. But we managed to save a child,” he added.
In Kiseljak, about 20 km southwest of Sarajevo, several houses, vehicles and gardens were flooded in just ten minutes.
“The rain started falling yesterday [jueves] around 9:00 p.m. and it continued all night,” the city’s mayor, Mladen Misuric-Ramljak, told AFP. “Everything was normal until 5:00 a.m., then enormous amounts of water fell.”
In neighboring Croatia, authorities have issued a red alert for flooding around the port of Rijeka. In a statement, they warned that flooding was expected in several cities, with electricity and water outages.
With global warming, the atmosphere contains more and more water vapor, increasing the risk of heavy precipitation.
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