Streets which turned into muddy rivers. A three meter-high tide wave that wipes out everything on its way - cars, frame houses, horrified people. Unfortunately, the above is not a frame of a latest Hollywood movie shot in Bulgaria. It is a real disaster that hit last Thursday the population of Asparuhovo district in Bulgaria’s coastal capital Varna. Representatives of the local authorities are to search for the reasons that caused this huge tragedy. The sad balance shows that thirteen people, including children, lost their lives during the natural disaster. The institutions are yet to calculate the volume of the material damages, but it is already evident that many homes were badly flooded and destroyed. This tragedy made hundreds of Bulgarians from all parts of the country give a helping hand to the victims. Twenty eight year-old Ivan Kukov is one of the volunteers who, instead of having a relaxing Sunday, chose to join the campaign and clean the deposits and the mud from the stricken homes. We told you about Ivan Kukov in one of our earlier articles. Ivan is a software engineer who became famous with his idea to make young IT experts settle in depopulated Bulgarian villages. Here is how he described the situation on Sunday in the worst-affected Varna district.

“The main streets which provided access to heavy machinery are relatively clean. They are still quite dusty, because the mud dries out and later turns into dust. However, the peoples’ homes are in a very bad state, as no machinery could enter there. They are now practically full of mud. Perhaps it will take us a couple more weeks to clean them, if there are enough volunteers to help.”

Most of the volunteers in Asparuhovo are young people. Their average age is around twenty five, says Ivan. He joined the initiative with four of his friends. The guys were sent to clean the house of an elderly family where they work alongside a group of boys who came all the way from Sofia to help.

“We gathered at 10 am on Sunday morning in front of the Asparuhovo Municipality building”, says Ivan. “This is the assembly point of all volunteers where the members of the Bulgarian Red Cross divide them into groups and send them to clean the stricken houses. The ground floor and the basement of the house we went to clean were full of water and mud. It took us one whole day to scrape the mud off one single room of around 10 square meters where the mud and the deposits were nearly 40-50 centimeters thick.”

Ivan also told Radio Bulgaria that all household belongings were completely destroyed. “God knows how terrified those people are from this natural disaster”, Ivan adds.

“In my view, people will struggle to come back to normal live there. However, they calmed a bit down when the volunteers asked them what they needed and they readily shared with us their real needs. They also told us that they would not be able to clean even part of their homes, if they did not receive help from volunteers.”

In Ivan’s view, the people in Asparuhovo need mainly drinking water and manpower to help them deal with the consequences of the calamity that hit them hard. “We are trying to encourage other people to join the initiative, because all people can be helpful there, even if they spend two hours cleaning”, contends the young Bulgarian. The number of volunteers goes down sharply during week days when people are at work. That is why Ivan came up with the proposal to Varna Municipality to give an extra day off to the people during a week day, so more volunteers can provide help to the needy.”

English version: Kostadin Atanasov