An employee of a weather station was found dead on Friday near Sarajevo, after the snowstorm which hit Bosnia earlier this week and which left tens of thousands of homes without electricity, emergency services announced . Started overnight from Sunday to Monday, and also hitting parts of Croatia and Serbia, the snowstorm slowed significantly across Bosnia, but thousands of people were still stranded Friday in dozens of isolated localities, the roads having become impassable.
A weather station at an altitude of more than 2000 meters
“Members of the mountain rescue services of the canton of Sarajevo (…) found on the south-eastern slope of Bjelasnica a body which we believe to be that of the missing employee of the Meteorological Institute”declared the head of the operation, Nermin Demir, on Facebook on the fourth day of the search. The disappearance of this 46-year-old man, who was heading towards a meteorological station at the summit of Bjelasnica, at an altitude of 2,067 m, was reported by one of his colleagues on Tuesday midday. A few hours earlier, he had called one last time to indicate his location, to say that he could not take the usual route and that he would try to go up another route, his colleagues told the media.
An international network of stations to observe climate change
More than fifty rescuers, including members of the special police and civil protection forces, began the fourth day of searching on Friday morning, which was particularly difficult due to thick fog and strong winds. The snow cover on Friday morning was 174 cm at the top of the mountain, while piles of snow formed by the wind reached nearly three meters in places, according to rescuers. The Bjelasnica weather station is part of a “international network of stations for observing climate change”explained in the media an official of the local Meteorological Institute, Edin Pismo.
Several tens of thousands of homes are still without electricity, particularly in the northern half of the country, as in many municipalities around Knezevo, 140 km northwest of Sarajevo, whose mayor Goran Borojevic has decreed the state of emergency. “The teams from the electricity company are repairing outages, but it is difficult to reach certain outage areas with a layer of snow of more than a meter”declared Mr. Borojevic on the public television of the Bosnian Serb entity (RTRS).
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