We routinely check the 'best before' dates on the myriad food products on supermarket shelves... but since the last posting about the motorway tax (and the state of Romania's infrastructure), felt compelled to elaborate a bit on just what is the 'best before' date stamped on that country's infrastructure.
Well, unfortunately, those goods have expired a long time ago... and the effects will be quite astounding...
A very conservative estimate stated that about 50 billion Euros would be needed to mend the country's infrastructure, not to make it perfect or state-of-the-art, but just mend it such that it becomes barely acceptable.
Trains move with the national average speed of about 45km/h (this is less than 30mph), due to the disastrous state of the rail tracks. 20 years of patching on ancient tracks has barely managed to keep them at a level where trains can just about operate and there are no deadly failures regularly. About 50% of the country's rail tracks have so-called dangerous points... that can give way at any time.
On top of this, let's not even touch on the state of the stations, the on average 30 years old train carriages (no, they don't just look ancient, they are ancient) - but then there are the antiquated signaling systems etc. - one may be misled by some bigger cities' more modern looking larger station halls... but those occasional computer screens don't mean that the essential parts of the railways match that level of apparent or real technical level... and having extensively travelled on these railways, one can certainly say: they really don't.
The modernising of urban transport has been done mostly by buying used and often old buses and trams from other countries. But these old vehicles look more 'modern' than any of the old Romanian buses and trams, so... again subjectively locals may feel a certain warm fuzzy feeling...
In order to eliminate the medieval conditions when it comes to countless smaller towns' and villages' water system, the estimate is about 20 billion Euros. This would not make them have latest and greatest water purification and pipe systems, this investment would just elevate them to a bearable level...
Where there are water purification plants and pipe systems, i.e. in all major cities, these date back to 50s and 60s, in best cases. Investment to modernise these have been postponed many times. The water quality in some major cities is such, that when sent for analysis in Germany, the labs thought the water was industrial 'B-category' waste water. The solution is to pump it full of chlorine, so that at least it doesn't cause problems with the organic pollution...
Asking several specialist doctors, an estimated 80% of adult population there has Giardiosis, a hugely widespread infection with a single-cell parasite that is amongst the hardest to eradicate, special antibiotic cocktails have a 90% chance of succeeding... and the parasite survives in 'standard' levels of chlorination of the water...
The blockflats built during the 50s, 60s and 70s are so shabby, that they can not withstand any noteworthy earthquakes, as this has been painfully demonstrated many times... and unfortunately, by now these buildings are truly in a sorry structural state.
51% of the population lives in rural areas, and only 10% (yes, 10%) of these settlements have sewage systems and mere 25% have running water.
30,000 Km of roads have no tarmac or asphalt coverage of any kind - they are dirt roads.
The heating systems for the vast areas of blockflats are also antiquated, date back 30-40 years and lose 30-40% of the heat due to ancient or non-existent thermal insulation.
Add to this the small fact, that as it has been eminently demonstrated over the last 20-odd years, any funds allocated to projects meant to modernise the infrastructure have been mostly stolen, which explains the truly absurd pace with which these projects progress.
So it is not a question of what is the country's 'best before' date. It has long passed, sometimes back in the 70s... and since then it's all been rotting away quietly.
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4 comments:
It doesn't look good for the ~5.1 billion people which are even worst off than Romanians :-)
True :-)... however, those ~5.1 billion are not having a somewhat schizoid political and image building exercise: at the same time that EU standards (and of course EU funds) are strutted in politicians' discourse, the actual reality is very different. So this, at best, puts those politicians' rhetoric (and corruption levels) to the levels seen in certain 3rd world countries...
I thought politicians' discourses are always meant to mask reality, in virtually any country.
On another note, I'd say this situation is also linked to average Romanians' happy irresponsibility , as you probably pointed out in earlier posts.
How can public transport be in a good condition when half (or more) of passengers never buy tickets?
What can one expect from people that in recent years were blind/dumb enough to pay tens, even hundreds of thousands of euros for apartments in those derelict old blocks?
True - however the euclidian distance between reality and politician discourse is remarkable in certain places of the globe, unfortunately again not favouring our (I say our, as all my relatives still live there) chances of seeing more light at the end of the tunnel.
In terms of irresponsibility, yes, absolutely right - there were decades that built a certain mentality, and now with the fast-tracking of capitalist models (virtually grafted on top of a reality that hasn't truly changed), the mixture becomes toxic.
The examples are good, and with the entire corruption picture (very much a self-reinforcing system, considering the economic situation that makes even ordinary people constantly look at how to 'squeeze' some profit out of any situation) it remains a very bumpy ride.
But one can only hope...
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