Flooded houses, gardens, fallen trees and great material damage were left behind by the storm that hit the village of Vlajići near Teslić on Tuesday afternoon, Anadolija reports.
The damage has yet to be determined, but from everything that can be seen on the ground, it is huge. It’s a sleepless night behind the locals, and they’ve been trying to clean the flooded buildings and yards since the morning hours. As they said about Anatolia, they have never experienced anything like this, and they have lived there all their lives. The Gomjenica River overflowed its banks and left behind a lot of damage.
The house of Vedran Mihajlović was completely destroyed, it can no longer be lived in.
“It was completely destroyed. I was left without a roof over my head. Everything I had acquired all my life was destroyed. I lived there with my wife and baby. Nothing can be saved here. I renovated everything last year. The torrent came within an hour destroyed everything,” Vedran said.
He does not remember a flood like this in this area.
“The head is alive and what’s there is. But it will take years of renovation here. Everything in the house was destroyed, from money, documents, children’s and our belongings, we were left without everything,” Vedran added.
We found Zvjezdan Mihajlović cleaning the flooded house and yard.
“I came from Slovenia last night and I had a lot to see. A disaster. Everything was swept away, timber, bricks, cement, the water swept away two auxiliary buildings and everything in them. I don’t remember anything like this, it’s never been like this. I’ve been here for 42 years “, stated Zvjezdan.
He is afraid of more precipitation.
And Niko Čančar with his family and friends cleans the yard and the ground floor of the house.
“Everything happened in half an hour. I was in front of the house and as soon as I entered, the water came in five minutes and flooded everything. I saw that the river of half a meter was going by the house. It was getting worse and worse. The water reached window,” Niko told Anatolia.
Teslić Mayor Milan Miličević also spoke about the floods and the damage caused.
“Currently, the teams are on the ground and are clearing up the consequences of what happened last night. Everything happened in about 20 minutes. In about 20 minutes there were torrential floods in the rivers and streams that are quite harmless when there is a calm period, without precipitation Milicevic said.
He pointed out that the reason for this situation is the unplanned cutting of forests in all parts of the municipality that are flooded.
“There are rules of conduct and forest order how to do it. Those rules are obviously not respected by those who exploit the forest. In that area you have bare logging, regular logging, an area that looks like an atomic bomb fell, logs that are in streams and that are dragged along the roads, the branches that were left all over the hills,” explained Milicevic.
He emphasized that in such a situation it happens that you have sudden rainfall, showers, water that takes all of that with it, creates a “plug in some area” and then you get a dam where a large amount of water is formed in a short period of time.
“And then that cap broke under great pressure and that huge torrent descended into the settlement and destroyed everything in front of it. Now we have a situation where the settlement is threatened. Now we are removing the consequences, the machines were also on the ground last night and the roads are passable. They are being cleaned houses where the water entered, firefighters were on the ground last night as well, the pumps are turned on, now the mud and yards are being cleaned. The commissions have started listing the damage. The damage will be great, although I can’t say how much it will be now,” Miličević said.
According to him, the request for help will be sent to all relevant institutions.
“We had a case of a family with a small baby who could no longer return to their house because it was completely flooded. We placed them in an apartment that we have for such situations,” said Miličević.
As he said, in the last ten years the municipality has invested a lot of funds and worked on the regulation of the bed of two large rivers – Velika and Mala Usora.
“Until we did that, we had floods both in the city and in the suburbs, now we don’t have that. If it wasn’t for that, we would have Teslić flooded today,” Milicevic added.
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