Strong storm winds that blew across the Herzegovina region (southern Bosnia) this weekend resulted in 10 people being injured and material damage to many homes and other facilities.
The Head of the Mostar City's Civil Protection Department, Predrag Supljeglav, said that they reacted timely and did everything to protect citizens and their property.
“Utility and other services also reacted, and we did not receive any information from any of the competent authorities that they could not respond to the situation on the ground, therefore the conditions for declaring a natural disaster were not met,” Supljeglav said. “Besides, neither the Civil Protection Headquarters declared a state of natural or other disasters, so we couldn’t do anything else.”
The Head of the Mostar Fire Department, Petar Juric, said they had 47 interventions over the weekend.
“Our operating centre had a lot more calls, and I'm only talking about the calls to which we could respond. Of this, we had 25 technical interventions, such as the cutting of felled trees and their removal from roads, the removal of roofing sheets, and the like. We also had 22 fire interventions in which chimneys, houses and flats, but also grass and low plants were on fire,” Juric said.
All interventions were successful, he said.
On the other hand, Tomislavgrad municipality had to declare a state of natural disaster due to storm winds.
“It’s difficult to say the exact number of damaged facilities, at the moment, but we had to declare the state of natural disaster, on Saturday,” Head of the Tomislavgrad Municipality, Ivan Vukadin, said. “Our services were in the field recording the damage done by the winds, but our first estimates say that more than 200 houses were damaged.”
He confirmed that the winds only caused damage to the facilities, but that no one was injured.
“Two nearby villages were hit the hardest, but no one was injured, luckily. They were out of electricity, but we managed to reconnect them to the grid in two days,” Vukadin added.
He asked the citizens to photograph the damage first, before applying for damage compensation.
