“We warned about the quarry”, said a young man from Donja Jablanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who led me through the bushes towards the top of the hill. When we reached the clearing caused by the avalanche, the young man retreated.
“I can’t go any further. Those up there are dangerous”, he said before disappearing again into the dense bushes, writes the Istraga.ba portal whose team was at the scene of the tragedy in Donja Jablanica.
We are reproducing their text in full:
Two hundred meters up the hill and you can already see the site of the stone quarry. An avalanche twenty-five meters wide came down directly from the quarry onto the houses in Donja Jablanica.
Huge pieces of granite are still scattered around, and between them water flows down from the top of the mountain, creating solid streams. The boulders, once separated from the large rocks by blasting in the quarry above the village, fell towards the Sarajevo-Mostar road and leveled everything in their path.
The owner of the quarry is Dženan Honđo. If you see his associates in the photos available on social networks, you understand why the locals are afraid. Honđo has not yet been arrested. Experts should arrive at the quarry in the coming days to determine whether the exploitation was carried out properly and whether the quarry had all the necessary permits to operate.
According to Istraga’s findings, “waste” has not been removed from this quarry for years after quarrying. And that is exactly what created sediment after the torrents descended from the top of the mountain. When the sediment was set in motion, a large rock avalanche moved towards the village and literally leveled everything in its path.
A photograph shows the path that the avalanche took from the quarry to the village. When the rock avalanche, accompanied by a torrent of water, brought down several houses in Donja Jablanica, a large dam was formed under the underpass where the railway and road diverge. The water then overflowed into the left part of the settlement and began to flood houses.
“That’s the roof of the vakuf house where I used to live”, local imam Semir efendija Jahić told Istraga.ba.
The water first flooded the ground floor. The imam and his family escaped upstairs. But then the first floor was also flooded.
“We managed to get some empty bottles and crossed over to the mosque. We couldn’t enter the minaret because half of the minaret was already flooded. Then we climbed up to the dome. There we managed to accommodate a few neighbors. My wife swam and carried the children on her back to a piece of land. I stayed in the mosque until dawn because I didn’t know how to swim. The Civil Protection saved me”, Imam Jahić said.
We cross over the remains of the destroyed houses to a part of the village that is still cut off.
“Here is where the Tufek family’s house was. We haven’t found nine of them. Only the child was found and is in critical condition”, the neighbors said. The final number of casualties is still unknown. Because entire families have perished.
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Source: Nova.rs/Istraga.ba
Photo: ELVIS BARUKCIC / AFP / Profimedia