Despite the proclamation of Montenegro as an eco-state, the Skadar Lake National Park is being mercilessly destroyed with a growing accumulation of waste which has become visible after the floods.

 

A Lesson Unlearned from the January Floods

Plastic bottles, bags, glass and aluminum packaging, television sets, refrigerators, and chairs – all this is driven ashore the Skadar Lake through its vegetation. Immediately after the January floods, the image of the lake gave more the impression of a waste-rock dump than the Skadar Lake National Park in ecological Montenegro, which is recognized in Europe as the habitat of numerous endemic species.

In many villages upstream of the Morača River, which flows into the lake, waste is stored in illegal waste dumps washed away to the lake by rivers when their water level rises. During the January floods, The Skadar Lake National Park was buried with waste which is still being removed from the protected area, and activists leading the clean-up activity continue to find new dumps whose cause were not the floods.

Recently, on Saturday, April 17, during a clean-up activity, officials of the Ministry for Spatial Planning and Environment discovered new large quantities of waste washed down by the Morača River and transported by lake currents to various localities in the national park.

The Ministry of Spatial Planning and Environment sent out a message to all to take care of waste management, separate waste, and store it in waste containers set-up for this very purpose. “By throwing waste into the Skadar Lake we destroy the environment and cause permanent harm to our own and the reputation of the state, whose Constitution contains a provision defining it as an ecological state,” said a press release from the Ministry of Spatial Planning and Environment.

Transcript: The image shows the Skadar Lake on January 17, 2010, only a few hundred yards away from the visitors’ center of the National Park. The floods brought to surface the several-year-long lack of care by individuals as well as the national park and competent state authorities. The coastal area of the Skadar Lake is covered with accumulated waste. Competent authorities are expected to start a clean-up activity; however, as it seems, the problem cannot be solved with a single activity.

All Guilty, None Responsible

Competent authorities as well as locals wash their hands of the responsibility concerning such incidents. All are responsible, but none are taking action. The objection against locals is their garbage dumping in “wild” dumps, while locals charge competent public utilities services with not placing enough waste disposal containers.

Locals this reporter found in the village of Vranjina in the Montenegrin principality of Zeta, who wished to stay anonymous, said authorities have rarely visited since the January floods, and that they continue to store waste in the usual locations. Asked whether they have turned to the Public Utilities Service (Komunalno preduzeće) for possibly introducing more waste containers, they admit they haven’t and say that the competent authorities ought to know whether there is a sufficient number of waste containers or not.

“We have nowhere to store waste. The container is far away, so everyone stores waste where they can,” said a local. The one thing nearly everyone said was – “may it never happen again.”

Dušan Radonjić, the president of the Podgorica municipality of Golubovci located at the Skadar Lake, said that the accumulation of waste in the Skadar Lake area testifies to the serious neglect of not only various companies, but also citizens: “The degree of civil culture and awareness in relation to adequate waste storage is the very reason we found ourselves in an ecological incident during January, and I feel that the process of changing awareness in this sense is the most difficult and long-lasting process, but one that surely needs to be intensified.”

Radonjić said the number of waste containers in Lower Zetan villages is growing, and that there is many more containers than there were 20 years ago when such wild waste dumps didn’t exist and when residents of rural areas knew how to treat waste properly.

“This is not the case today, and we see more and more highly emancipated residents of rural areas storing plant-cutting waste in waste containers. In some states of the European Union this is used to produce energy.”

He reminds that the Zetan villages are not the only ones gravitating towards streams flowing into the Skadar Lake, and he does not acknowledge “all the credit for such an ecological state of the lake, but [is] doing all to reduce the chances of similar events happening again to a minimum.”

Drastic Penalties in the Future

After the January floods, the residents of Virpazar, a small village on the coast of the Skadar Lake, started a clean-up activity under the name “Our Reputation is Surfacing – Let’s Clean It Up!” (Ispliva nam obraz – očistimo ga!”), which involves “rising up against the waste.” One of the initiators of the clean-up activity, Zlatko Vujotić, said he hopes the authorities will, as announced, make an effort to punish all those endangering the environment.

The Ministry is announcing severe penalties for those who disobey and also stress they will “devise” ways and work in the long term to remove all wild waste dumps in national parks.

“They are urging for clean environment in vein. Some individuals will never come to their senses. Nothing will work until penalties are introduced. They can place surveillance cameras in some locations, they can invest in marketing, and they can set a date in each municipality for public utilities to come around and pick up large waste that people put in front of their houses. It’s better picking up a sofa from the street than hauling it out of the lake,” Iva said in comment to the Ministry’s press release on the Caffe Montenegro web portal.

A service for “maintaining environmental hygiene and infrastructure” operates within the scope of the Skadar Lake National Park, but they are powerless to influence the large quantities of waste coming from rivers flowing into the lake.

“We clean the most critical points each year, but this remains an emergency situation in which large quantities of garbage were brought down by the rivers. The southern wind stops the waste from traveling on to the Bojana and the Adriatic Sea, so the waste simply stays in the northern and western portions of the lake,” said the managing director of the Skadar Lake National Park Zoran Mrdak yesterday. The Morača’s river bed contains, he claims, 15 to 20 illegal waste dumps in the territory of the Municipality of Golubovci alone.

The utilities company Čistoća identified 21 wild waste dumps with an average of 1,000 cubic ft (30 cubic meters) of various waste stored against regulations in the area of the capital and the municipalities of Golubovci and Tuzi!

“These illegal dumping spots have been cleaned up several times during the last years, both within the planned activities of the Public Utilities Service and as result of a decision by the utility police where we intervened 88 times,” says Borislav Đurenović, the managing director of Čistoća.

A Grid-like Waste Trap in the Morača Soon

Despite the proclamation of Montenegro as an eco-state, the Skadar Lake, proclaimed a national park nearly 30 years ago, is being mercilessly destroyed by becoming buried in a growing accumulation of waste which has made the high water level visible after the floods.

The waste, according to Zoran Mrdak, is not created in and around the lake itself, but comes mostly via the Morača River. Mrdak announced an important project to limit the inflow of waste into the lake – the construction of a grid-like waste trap in the river bed of the Morača, soon to be erected.

Waters Retain Prescribed Quality

The streams of the Skadar Lake after the January floods, though certain amounts of organic pollutants have reached the lake, retain the prescribed water solvency, the Ministry of Spatial Planning and Environment said.

“It was a realistic assumption that the floods would have an effect on the inflow of pollutants from the flooded area into the water. There is no regulation for the discharge and treatment of wastewater for a large portion of the flooded area from the Montenegrin and Albanian sides.” stresses the Ministry’s press release.

Simultaneously, another potentially greater source of contamination is stable manure from stock-farming facilities and agricultural surfaces, a large amount of organic and non-organic material, vegetation deposits and debris which, caught in the flood wave, could have reached the water.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Video taken from the web site of the Podgorican IN television station.