Emerging water crisis in Bulgaria and the consequences of a decades-old governmental miserliness
Whoever’s reading this - please spread this however you can. It means a lot to me, my community, my country and spreading the word would be of immense help! ❤💖 I couldn’t include all the details about the case but I hope I’ll get the chance to do that if this post gain popularity. Thank you all guys!! 💕
Woah – one of my few own posts and it’s got nothing to do with what my blog is mainly about. But whatever - this is important to thousands of people, my family included and I’ll spread the fucking word.
November 18th, 2019 - Pernik, a town with a population of over 120 000, and several villages in its region have to be put under water restrictions. Officially. In reality that happened in October but people were expecting it earlier. Why so?
Ever since the beginning of summer in 2019 there were apparent problems with the water supply - nobody could ever be sure when there would be running water at all. By September it was apparent that something was not alright and people were getting impatient with the government’s silence. In October it was finally revealed that the main source of the local water supply - reservoir ‘Studena’ - had been steadily losing water over the last months at the very least. The schedule underwent several changes over the following periods of time:
1st: 6am-10am and 5pm-10pm / October 2019
2nd: 2pm-10pm / mid-December 2019
3rd: 3pm-10pm/ January 2nd 2020
The initial outlook provided by the media and Water and Sanitation Pernik representatives is the following: the restrictions were supposed to last until April. But the more time passed the more dire this outlook became - first the period was extended by a month, then by two months. Now even the media can’t hide the truth - the ‘Studena’ reservoir’s water level is below its critical point and the supply’s expected to last for about a month before it’s completely gone.
People have been buying hundreds of litres of bottled water because of the restrictions but now there’s an even worse reason - tap water’s not drinkable anymore because of the heavy chlorination. Rumors about the water being infected with salmonella were also spreading (they’re ‘untrue’, according to media but I doubt that).
Here are a few photos of what ‘Studena’ looked like in 2015, keeping up until early 2019:
Here’s how it looked in September-November-December and now in January:
I wanted to show you how bad the situation truly is - no coverups, no hypocrisy, no lies. Just the truth.
I want you to consider those thousands of people, a large part of them families and retired people living below the poverty line, just in this one municipality. Now multiply them by ten, by thirty, by fifty and so on. Why? Because Pernik is not the first municipality, part of the EU country of Bulgaria in the 21st century, to be put under water restriction. Several others at the very least have been under restriction for years already but only now are the people speaking out about the atrocious coverup of those restrictions.
Against the Amazonian fires, Philippines floods and the current Australian fires this problem might not seem like much but it is to all the people suffering because of the government that caused it. Please, spread this however you can so that we can shed light on the hypocrisy of the Bulgarian government because this is the only way the truth is going to be seen. Not through manipulated media but through the people subject to the damage caused by the inhumanity of those in control of the lives of an entire nation.
