Comment by Emilia Milcheva:
Natural disasters in Bulgaria, increasingly often also someone's death, reveal pits of corruption. Torrential rains flood cut-down forests, silted-up riverbeds and ravines, for the cleaning of which millions have been "absorbed". Death comes because of "eaten" asphalt and faulty infrastructure, for which taxpayers have paid even more. The incoming waters carry away soil, trees, property, cars and the illusion of control. Nature finishes what corruption has already started, which is public trust in statehood and justice.
There is a river, there is no river
Four victims have been killed in the holiday complex “Elenite” after a month's worth of rain poured down in just a few hours and destroyed homes, roads, and water and sewer systems. On social networks, ecologists, hydrologists, and geologists are asking questions about the responsibility of the specialists who prepared the PUP that allowed the construction of a riverbed, the local authorities who approved it, and the chief architects of the Nessebar municipality and the Regional Inspectorate for Environment and Water-Burgas, who allowed the construction of the buildings.
Experts immediately refuted the Minister of Ecology Manol Genov (BSP), according to whom ”... there is no river there, but several dry ravines”. Environmentalists such as Irina Mateeva and other experts reported on the Drashtela River, whose mouth has not been discovered since 2010. "After 2003, the estuary of the Drashtela River, where it descends from the steep slopes to the sea, has been built up with buildings.... In the cadastre, the same river runs along the ravine on the mountain slope, but where it reaches the settlement, to the built road, it suddenly disappears," Mateeva wrote on Facebook, referring to Google Earth. With the help of the same tool, others discovered the Drashtela trough.
Whose buildings are built on the path of the water, with what funds were they built and whether taxes were paid on them are other questions, the answers to which also aggravate the problem. The promises that there will be checks to see if the construction is illegal are empty talk. They are given… because they have to be given. When everything calms down, no one remembers the promises.
The housing construction that covered the riverbed in “Elenite” was completed 15 years ago, which means that the statute of limitations for official and documentary crimes have expired. Who signed, who built - irresponsibility remains a burden on nature. And petty corruption continues to “wash" the great corruption.
A team of scientists from Sofia University and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences mapped and filmed the holiday village with a drone to find the path of the great wave. Assoc. Prof. Stiliyan Dimitrov - the director of the National Center for Geospatial Research and Technology at Sofia University, confirmed to journalists that the ravine is built up and the “huge compromises” are visible to the naked eye. The buildings built on the path of the water limit the space in which it can spill and increase its impact power. And at the bottom of the watershed, where the water naturally invades from both slopes, an aquapark has been built….
Rain with a capital “R”
The nameless natural element always turns out to be the “criminal” in cases such as the tragedy in “Elenite”. In June 2014, the Varna district of Asparuhovo suffered severely from tidal waves from two ravines - the victims were 13, including 4 children, there were dozens of destroyed homes, cars and several streets. Three years later, the situational expertise appointed by the prosecutor's office indicated the cause as torrential rainfall and the illegal construction of the western security channel.
Nevertheless, the prosecutor's office again requested that the criminal case for the tragedy in Asparuhovo be terminated. In 2018, the Court of Appeal in Varna did so, accepting that the main reason was “the extremity of the natural event”. The prosecutors' inner conviction - a yardstick for their decisions - is that landslides, household and construction waste, and buildings along and in the ravine were not among the main causes of the damage and death of 13 people.
Will the mayor of Tsarevo again shift the responsibility for the disaster there to climate change, as in the flood in 2023, in which four people died? According to eco-activist and former Deputy Minister of Ecology Toma Belev, however, what happened today is the result of corruption and incompetence. The reason, he believes, is in a water supply repair, during which a canal was laid from a district of Tsarevo to the treatment plant. According to the project, the facility was supposed to be located behind the bridge and above the level of the highest waters, but in reality it was built in front of the bridge itself. If the pipe is not moved or reconstructed, there will be problems, as it gets clogged during floods.
By the way, intense rainfall was again to blame for the previous disaster in Tsarevo in 2023. According to a report from September 2023 by the then Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Water, Petar Dimitrov, today an advisor to Minister Genov, the main reasons are "the formed meteorological situation of intense rainfall, in combination with the characteristic geography of the region, which predetermined the direction and speed of water runoff". The damage was from "extreme rainfall", such as occurs every 200-500 years. But he also gives due credit to the state of the infrastructure in the region - "bridge facilities that are not sized for current and future hydro-climatic conditions". Ultimately, in 2023, the government decided to allocate 40 million leva to Tsarevo for the restoration of 10 infrastructure sites - the walls of two dams and three bridges. Belev believes that the prosecutor's office should investigate how this money was spent, but it is unlikely to do so.
What does the prosecutor's office do?
The prosecutor's office works as a second National Security Service (NSS) - the guards guard the bodies of the political elite, and the prosecutor's office guards the "clean judicial past", theirs and that of their business angels. If it followed its constitutional duties - supervision of compliance with the law, there would also be demolished buildings that would serve as an edification for anyone who dared to destroy nature indiscriminately.
So far, Bulgaria has been hit by torrents, but what will happen if the earth shakes tomorrow? How many of the "new", "luxury" buildings will last? Are the bridges and roads built with public procurement money stable - or will they collapse because materials were "saved"?
Natural disasters show the true face of the system - everything collapses when the foundations are rotten with corruption. But the inner conviction of many prosecutors shows that corruption does not actually exist, or at least it is not where the public sees it.