Bujduveanu: Prevention ensured that Bucharest didn’t look like Slobozia

„At this moment we have escaped any danger, we are still vigilant, we have our people inside the integrated emergency situations centre. It is remarkable how in Bucharest there is the only integrated centre where all law enforcement forces from 112, ISU (Emergency Situations Inspectorate), including police, including local police and district town halls and Metrorex and absolutely all Apa Nova operators are in the same station under a single command. How well this coordination worked, because we started with prevention, we started last night (Tuesday evening – ed.), from the moment the red code was announced”, says Stelian Bujduveanu on Digi 24.

He says that without prevention, Bucharest could have looked like Slobozia

„If we hadn’t had the pumps on the street… there were 500 people on the streets from Apa Nova and the other law enforcement forces who cleared all the channels. The municipality of Bucharest’s underpasses are for the first time after a storm passable at the first hour and I believe we’ve achieved our objective. I believe prevention was welcome and this is how we must react every time”, the interim general mayor also says.

Bujduveanu states that ANM (National Meteorological Administration) announced rainfall of over 140 litres per square metre, which „has never happened in Bucharest. The record was 120 litres in 2005, when Bucharest was paralysed.

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You can imagine that the workers from Apa Nova, from ISU know Bucharest’s history and we citizens know it, we know how serious it was. And so we prepared for the worst-case scenario. And we prayed that it would be the least problematic scenario and so it was”, the mayor states.

Bujduveanu also says he was pleased this morning when he saw that Bucharest’s streets were passable and that public transport was at maximum capacity.

„On every main artery, Apa Nova went with special equipment that unblocked the sewers, together with the sanitation operators who cleaned up afterwards so that no more branches would come to block those areas. We had divers in the two large collectors under the Dâmbovița, to monitor the water level. The collector under the Dâmbovița is just like a river. When it flows at high speed and is not obstructed, at that moment we don’t have water on the streets. If at some point all these collector channels on the streets become blocked, the streets fill with water and the Dâmbovița remains empty underneath. Today we ensured that this flow of collecting water from the street until discharging it to get it out of Bucharest functioned impeccably”, the interim general mayor also says.

After the danger has passed, from Thursday pupils and students in Bucharest return to classes

„Yes, tomorrow they return (pupils and students to classes – ed.). The Prefecture’s decision to suspend classes and that of the universities, which was distinct, the universities being autonomous, was given for only one day, for precisely today (Wednesday – ed.). The decision was correct, from the perspective that the Municipality of Bucharest has a number of over 500,000 pupils, students and pre-schoolers, who if in the crisis situation, if the storm had been like in Slobozia, if we hadn’t intervened overnight and we don’t prepare for the worst-case scenario, all these parents would have had to leave urgently, to collect their children either from school or from nursery and would have created a massive problem for the city, because all the emergency vehicles, speaking of ambulances, of rapid intervention vehicles, would have been paralysed in traffic, including public transport. So this measure was a necessity, seeing that in other counties a similar measure was also taken”, the mayor also says.