He also emphasized that the municipality is facing a drinking water crisis, and there are areas where roads are impassable and residents need to be delivered food.
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According to the mayor, since mobile communication has not been restored everywhere in the municipality, the municipality does not know how many residents need help.
M. Varaška stressed that the coming days will be critical in ensuring the essential needs of the residents.
“These days will be critical in ensuring other essential needs, including hygiene. There are many families with small children who need more than just puddle water to wash and get clean. We will invite such people to come to the city or try to bring them,” the mayor said to LRT television on Monday.
According to him, the central government did not do its homework after the storm that hit two years ago.
“If it weren’t for the lessons the government didn’t learn after the storm that occurred at the same time in 2024, two-thirds of the problems wouldn’t even exist today. You yourself mentioned mobile phones, mobile communication towers – it was the same two years ago, no conclusions were made,” the mayor explained.
“During the first half-day, people called the BPC (General Assistance Center – BNS) or other help lines and could not get through, later they could not get through because their mobile communication devices stopped working as the batteries ran out,” he added.
The mayor argued that it is necessary to widen the clearings along power line routes.
“If we look at the Latvian example, you can have not three, but six meters of clearing for a 10-kilovolt line, and the likelihood of it being damaged is much lower,” the mayor said.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Utena district, Marijus Kaukėnas, said that restoring electricity supply could take a week.
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“ESO (‘Energy Distribution Operator’ – BNS) is unable to restore those major lines, the 110 and 10 kilovolt lines. (…) The simplest explanation is that the company probably does not have the resources to restore (electricity supply – BNS) in such a situation,” M. Kaukėnas told LRT television.
“They haven’t even caught up with the intensity of repairing the 10-kilovolt lines, let alone the remote 0.4-kilovolt lines. Apparently, the situation here is not a matter of days, maybe even weeks,” he added.
According to the mayor of Utena district, ESO lacked preparation to deal with the consequences of such a storm.
According to the “Energy Distribution Operator” (ESO), late Monday evening about 82,000 users still did not have electricity.
Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said after an inter-institutional meeting on Monday that the storm revealed long-standing state problems. The head of government regretted that the consequences of the storm could not be eliminated faster.
ESO head Renaldas Radvila said on Monday that the storm that swept through Lithuania over the weekend was more than a third more intense than two years ago – its scale hinders faster removal of the consequences. According to him, the most affected districts are Utena, Kaunas, Vilnius, and Panevėžys – here restoring electricity supply to the last customers may take until August 29, Saturday.
According to ESO data, the maximum number of outages was recorded on Saturday evening, when 268,000 users were without electricity.
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Author Lukas Oželis
