Wasted Water: Leaking Pipelines Threaten to Let Balkans Run Dry

Then the good queen heard their prayers and started to cry. Her tears created two mighty rivers, which carved several lakes. The drought was over. Today that area is known as the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. This is the myth about how they were created.

The age of such myths and legends is long gone. Today we wouldn't need a phantom queen or a careless woman to create a lake of this size in the Balkans. All we need to do is collect all the water that gets lost through the pipelines of the public utility companies that supply the region's capital cities.

Illustration: BIRN

Pipeline holes, loose connections, defects not discovered on time - all of this costs the Balkan capitals a lot of water. So much that if this lost water was directed into one place, it would fill a huge lake, like the ones in the fairy stories.

If the water lost through the pipelines in Skopje, Belgrade, Pristina, Tirana, Zagreb, Sofia, Sarajevo and Ljubljana was collected, it would fill a reservoir the size of Dojran Lake in North Macedonia.

Put into another perspective, the amount of water lost through the water supply systems in these cities would fill 115,000 Olympic-sized pools, just like the one in Tokyo where US swimmer Caeleb Dressel set two Olympic records for 50 and 100-meter freestyle.

Casually not caring about these losses will have to be abandoned soon. Looking out the window and seeing the extended droughts, record wildfires and record heatwaves battering the region, it is clear that something has to be done.

Almost all climate models for the Balkans predict both a rise in average temperatures and a decline in the availability of water of 10 to 13 per cent by 2060.

By the end of the century, the worst-case scenario...