Bucharest is the latest part of Romania to slip underwater, thus more or less completing the full set of regions flooded this year. Luckily this biblical cleansing of the nation has been staggered so that at least people had places to go when their area was up for being washed.
The advantage with the floods being in Bucharest for the TV stations is that their correspondents didn't actually have to leave the capital, and they could report the floods at length. (TV News in Romania is very much centred on Bucharest at the best of times - the rough equivalence is "man falls down pothole in Bucharest" = "two men savagely murdered in Craiova/Cluj/Iasi/...". I exaggerate, but not overly) Last night then we got an orgy of stories from the flooded capital, from the leaking senate bulding (pictures of senators in session holding umbrellas) to people complaining loudly about the drainage to peoples' kitchens with three inches of water on the floor. It went on for about 25 minutes of a 30 minute news broadcast.
I expect this flood to dominate the news for some more days to come. We still have to have the inevitable recriminations about the lack of drainage in the capital (which does, it must be said, seem to be a major problem), plus there'll be lots of human interest stories about a family in some suburb whose sofa was damaged beyond repair.
[A few minutes later: Just re-read this and realised it comes across as an extended moan about unbalanced TV coverage, which, while true, was not what I set out to write about. Bucharest is flooded, and seriously so, it seems. Apologies if it seems I have been making light of that fact.]
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1 comment:
I kind of doubt Bucharest was affected as bad or as dramatic as the media covers it. I even got phone calls from relatives asking if I am allright or if I "survived".
This reminds me of Radio Erevan jokes. It's not like Godzilla finally made it to Bucharest -- there are streets flooded, other related damages and the traffic throughout the city is f*** up, but this is business as usual whenever we have bad weather in Bucharest.
Also, it's bad that the muni was not prepared for this but that's yet another reality check.
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