Landslides shake Bosnia: It is pointless to repair houses when they can disappear under the ground again

Bosnia and Herzegovina has been continuously shaken by landslides since May last year, when hundreds of houses, roads and other infrastructure were destroyed across the country. If the damage from floods is included, in just a few days of May 2014, the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina suffered material damage from water and torrents of thick mud, which experts estimated at more than four billion KM.

Although domestic and foreign governments, as well as a large number of humanitarian organizations from the country and the world, have invested huge funds in the remediation of destroyed facilities in less than a year, experts warn that this could be just a waste of money, because to do the job properly, it is also necessary to work on landslide remediation, which, unfortunately, due to lack of money in the state budget, has hardly been done so far.

Fahrudin Solak, director of the Federal Administration of Civil Protection, warns that governments in Bosnia and Herzegovina must urgently find funds and start landslide remediation, regardless of the fact that it requires large sums of money and years of work, but only repairing destroyed facilities is not a permanent solution for this country.

- Landslide remediation is perhaps as complex as building a tunnel, or even more. It requires the engagement of several experts from different fields, time and money, but if the problem is to be solved permanently, action must be taken in that direction - says Solak in an interview with the Bosnian news agency Patria.