Engineers in boots and suits are walking the streets, women clad in Wellington boots are clearing out the mess in their homes, a worker is spraying the ruins with disinfectant, hundreds of dead worms are floating about on the top of puddles that have remained in depressions - a few days after the flood waters have subsided Felsőzsolca looks like New Orleans after the hurricane struck. The sour smell of decay hangs over the whole of the little town.

Many people invite the visitors from Budapest into their homes, and everybody shows the damage as the complaints flood out - even though in normal circumstances in the countryside today people are reluctant to open up to strangers. Everybody has suffered some degree of loss.

For example, Istvánné Pecze in Edelény lost everything she had that was on the ground floor, yet she is the most upset about her thirty hens. "We had to flee in the night in a boat, the water came so quickly. There was only enough time to put the chickens in cages onto the terrace but I couldn't let the hens out and they drowned in the chicken hutch. Everybody in this street has lost animals, and many of them have lost their dogs that were tied to posts," said Mrs Pecze.

Their dog survived as there was room in the boat, but now it is crouching terrified in one of the corners of the yard full of silt; the look in its eyes shows that it is in shock. Another family in Felsőzsolca are carrying their sodden movable property out of their newly renovated, once tidy house. The adobe walls are cracking beneath the new plasterwork, and they fear that this house will have to be demolished too. 

"I got out a one-and-a-half-million-forint loan for renovation, and there would only have been a year's payments to make on it," said the owner. The flood came at night here too and the water started gushing up out of the strip floor so people had to run so fast that they left the cocoa on the oven ring. The housewife sadly shows the cupboard made by her son who is training as a joiner and his bank book floating on the top of the bath. "How can I start everything all over again?" 

Inventory

Over four thousand people had to be moved out of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County, and in nine villages at least 150 houses collapsed (approx. two hundred houses in 51 settlements throughout the country). The number of condemned buildings will rise yet further as adobe will continue to crack when it dries. Almost everywhere it was the older adobe houses that collapsed, but it was not only cheaply made buildings that were affected but also many that had been in good condition. In some cases all that can be seen of newly renovated houses are the concrete rings placed on old walls now crumbled to powder and scattered in a pile of mud, while in other places apparently intact houses stand next to round gaping holes as if a tank had driven through their walls.    

Felsőzsolca, next to Miskolc, was the hardest hit and, according to the statistics of the mayor's office, 123 houses here are in an irreparable condition. Almost twenty houses have collapsed in Edelény and 15 in Szendrő, while Hernádnémeti, Gesztely and Ócsanálos lost five or six.

The Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture estimates that the nationwide damage to agriculture will come to almost 100 billion forints. Infrastructure has also been seriously damaged.  For example, in the centre of Szendrő there is a shocking gaping hole where the Bódva bridge used to be, and people now cross from one side of the little town to the other on a temporary wooden bridge. The main road in Edelény was also seriously damaged although the Baroque castle on Bódva Island remains intact, and the reconstruction programme started this year did not fall victim to the flood either.

Man on the dam

In Edelény, where billions of forints worth of damage has been caused, the drinking water and sewage networks, and the roads themselves will have to be rebuilt. "A reconstruction project initiated by a government decision will have to be made in the areas hit by the flood in Borsod, like in the past in Bereg County in 2001," said mayor Oszkár Molnár to Heti Válasz. Edelény has thus far received 150 million forints from the central vis major budget but this was spent on building defenses. According to the mayor, civil society's help is also needed.

The aid packages piled up on several trucks in the local government building show that a lot of donations have already arrived. The town has now launched a sandbag ticket scheme through which anybody can contribute to Edelény's reconstruction by paying one thousand forints to buy a symbolic sandbag. "I'm going to build this town anew," insisted Molnár.

The mayor came out of the catastrophe strengthened as a leader; almost everybody has praised Molnár - he was there on the dam to the end, organising the defence, rescue parties, and the distribution of aid packages, standing his ground to the limit of his physical abilities. However, in Felsőzsolca, Attila Fehér, who has been mayor for twenty years, has lost his popularity. The people from Zsolca that we questioned blamed the mayor for the tragedy, and poured out their complaints - and seeing the extent to which tempers have flared he may be lucky that the police station was built right in the local government building.   

The mayor was too late to assess how dangerous the situation was and was not able to organise the defence of the settlement properly. There were not enough sandbags to go on the most vulnerable points, while many think that too many sandbags were stacked in almost the only place in the settlement which in the end was not inundated by the flood.

As far as the behaviour of the community's leader in a time of crisis is concerned, it seems that the mayor made some serious mistakes in this area. "It's not true that I disappeared in the most difficult days, I was here in the mayor's office all the time.  I didn't sleep for three days," explained Fehér, though he concedes that he personally didn't stack sandbags, saying that would be running after cheap popularity.   

It is understandable that failure to defend the settlement has resulted in disappointment and exhaustion for the people of Felsőzsolca, who felt abandoned and are now looking for someone to blame for the tragedy, since the little town was worse hit than any other settlement in Borsod. Eighty percent of Felsőzsolca was inundated with water and almost every family suffered some damage. The losses to the local government alone come to 1.25 billion forints, while an assessment has yet to be made of the hundreds of collapsed and damaged houses. "The floods came from three directions at once, from the Sajó, the Kis-Sajó and the Bódva rivers. The Kis-Sajó does not even have a line of defence; the water is running at the back of the gardens. Even the whole Chinese army couldn't have protected the settlement," claims Attila Fehér.    

At the bottom of a deep bowl

The locals are talking about another reason. The M30 motorway built a couple of years ago and the approach road to Zsolca serve almost as a dam in front of the little town which is set in a bay. Felsőzsolca is located as if it was at the bottom of a deep bowl which water cannot leave. Locals reported that the condition for the construction of the nearby Auchan hypermarket was a line of drainage canals but only one was built.

The reasons for the tragedy will only be revealed through a thorough water conservancy analysis, but it would also be worthwhile to dig out the building permits for the shopping centre constructed on the lowland plain between Miskolc and Felsőzsolca, since in 2007 one of the resolutions issued by the National Inspectorate for Environment, Nature and Water still regarded it as worrying that filling up the area would result in the flood water capacity of the Sajó river's reservoir decreasing. The resolution rejecting the construction on the site was later withdrawn.

Starting a reconstruction project similar to the one that was implemented after the 2001 flood and changed the overall image of the small region of Bereg is not possible this time since the damage in the Borsod County settlements is located sporadically with only a few old houses having collapsed in each street.

The only exception is Felsőzsolca, where, however, an analysis would be necessary of the altered hydrographical conditions following the construction along the M30: the behaviour of the three rivers must be modelled and a new system of dams constructed so that the catastrophe does not repeat itself.