Water regime in Bulgaria

I had promised to write a post about the situation with water in my country, Bulgaria, in this month. Because today is Dec. 31, I must make an effort to meet my deadline :-).
Because Bulgaria has sufficient water resources and good chlorination system, the population has success to safe drinkwater. Indeed, water companies as “natural monopolies” backed by government try their best to deteriorate people’s lives. Even when European investors come to our water companies, they very soon learn the good Bulgarian traditions of corruption and making profits by robbing and harassing poor people. A good example is “Sofiiska voda”, the company with British participation that supplies my city Sofia with water. It made its contract with the Municipality of Sofia in a way allowing it to break the contract with impunity while the Municipality owes absurd, astronimic-size payments if it ever decides to terminate the contract. So now the monopolist “Sofiiska voda” makes whatever it wants, e.g. not investing in water pipes and instead forcing the population to pay for the entire quantity of water lost from perforations in the old pipes. Also, I have a friend living in an apartment block with many Gypsies. Because the latter consume much water and don’t pay their bills, “Sofiiska voda” chooses the easiest way out and tries to force the correct Bulgarian tenants such as my friend to pay also the huge bills of the Gypsies. As reports the Dnevnik site, in November “Sofiiska voda” was fined by the anti-monopoly authority for stopping the water supply to some apartment buildings where many bills were unpaid (http://www.dnevnik.bg/show/?storyid=584535).
However, there is worse. In many villages and some towns, water supply is characterized by an outrageous phenomenon I call water regime. In 2006, in a blog post titled “Water regime, or how to create and perpetuate misery”, I wrote, “A number of cities and many towns and villages in Bulgaria suffer regular stopping of water for hours and days. This is called rezhim na vodata (water regime); I don’t know whether the word regime has such a meaning in English, because I have never read about a similar phenomenon in another country! I don’t know how many Bulgarians live under water regime – tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? My city Sofia is spared from it…” (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/08/water-regime-or-how-to-create-and.html)
The situation is slowly improving and some towns that used to be under water regime now have constant water supply, e.g. the ancient Danube town of Nikopol. I visited it in a summer more than 10 years ago; the water was stopped for hours every day and the only source of running water during these dry hours was one built by the Romans. Now, I know from a friend that the water supply in Nikopol is constant.
For the purpose of the present post, I searched the Web for information about the current situation with water regime in Bulgaria – how many villages and towns and how many people still suffer from it. I failed to find such information because in Bulgaria water regime isn’t considered news but rather the way things are. What I found were articles like one titled “Water regime is threatening half of Bulgaria” from May 14, 2007, the Dnevnik site (http://www.dnevnik.bg/show/?storyid=339743). Let me translate the beginning: “Almost half of Bulgaria is threatened by water regime if the population in these regions doesn’t spare the drinkwater and continues to use it for watering the gardens, warned on Monday water experts from the Ministry of Environment.” Do you see? Our government officials, instead of blushing and providing apologies for their failure to provide a vital service to their taxpayers and voters, are instead arrogantly blaming the population and threatening! (The same article mentions that “Spain, France and Italy have already introduced water regime”. I’ll be very thankful to any reader from these countries who provides information about the water regime in her country.)
In the beginning of my 2006 blog post, I described the situation in the village of Rasnik, where my family spends most weekends. This autumn, my husband called men with a water probe and they worked until reaching water at some 25 meters depth. This costed us about EUR 1500; I wonder how the villagers, who are much poorer than us, have managed to dig their water wells. But at least now we’ll enjoy constant water supply and don’t depend on the mercy of government-backed monopolists.