ASB Germany sends emergency team to Bosnia
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Today, Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund Deutschland (ASB) sent an emergency aid team to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The team will bring water treatment facilities, to produce drinking water, to the town of Šamac in the northern part of the country.
Drinkin water treatment will continue until the local water supply is fully functional again.
After the destructive floods in Bosnia and Serbia, hundred thousands of people are without clean drinking water. ASB’s water treatment facilities can produce up to 36,000 litres of drinking water and supply up to 7,000 people each day. The emergency team will also bring 9,000 canisters to distribute the water.
In Bosnia, more than 100,000 people had to be evacuated thus far. In total, 1,6 million people in the region are affected by the floods. ASB and the local Samaritan organisations IDC (Serbia) and Žene sa Une (Bosnia) are already helping the local populace by distributing relief materials to those families particularly affected.
IDC is also already preparing measures to rebuild the areas that were destroyed by the floods. A main focus will be on rebuilding the local agricultural sector, as 80,000 hectares of arable land are under water right now. Agriculture is the largest economic sector in many of the affected territories and provided an equivalently large part of the local jobs before the disaster. IDC will also provide legal aid to affected people, which will be needed as many of them have lost all of their documents to the floods.
Besides the local Samaritan cooperation in the field, SOLIDAR, the network of social NGOs in Brussels, is also calling its members to support the aid efforts.