Storms in Bulgaria: Two dead in Shoumen district
Two people died in two settlements in Bulgaria’s Shumen district in incidents related to the powerful storms that raged on November 4 in most of the country.
A day earlier, the weather bureau had issued a Code Orange warning of dangerous weather for every district in Bulgaria, variously for storms, heavy rains and strong wind.
Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) reported that in the village of Razvigorovo in the Shoumen district, a 51-year-old man died instantly after a wall collapsed on him.
The report said that a 67-year-old man in Veliki Preslav died after stepping on an electric wire broken by the storm.
The districts of Smolyan, Razgrad and Silistra were most affected by the bad weather. Roofs were swept away, poles and trees fell. Streets are flooded, and many places were left without power supply.
A state of emergency has been declared in part of the Silistra district.
In the other affected region in Northeastern Bulgaria – Razgrad, the situation was most serious in the villages of Lavino and Todorovo – in Isperih municipality, BNR said.
A partial state of emergency has been declared in Devnya municipality, in the Varna district. There is no electricity in the entire municipality, there are fallen sheet metal from roofs, and fallen trees were being removed from the road.
The Varna district administration told BNR that if the power supply is not restored, machine voting – in Bulgaria’s run-off mayoral elections on November 5 – in the village of Kipra will be provided by generators.
In Varna district, three other villages have no electricity because of the storm – Levski, Kalimantsi and Prosechen in Suvorovo municipality.
Heavy rain, accompanied by storm winds and thunder left 10 villages with no electricity in Tundzha municipality.
Dozens of reports of fallen trees and branches were filed in Yambol.
There were reports of inundated streets in various parts of Bulgaria, including Pernik and Plovdiv.
In Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia, the rain stopped in the early afternoon, and since the morning, fire teams had responded to several reports of flooding, BNR said.
The heavy rains on November 4 come after more than two months of warm and dry weather in Bulgaria – described in official reports by the weather bureau as having seen a September and October that were among the warmest in Bulgaria in 90 years – that followed prolonged heatwaves in Bulgaria in July and August 2023.
(Archive photo: Thomas Bush/sxc.hu)
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