Lithuanian army to help Kazlų Rūda recover from storm

The Lithuanian army will help Kazlų Rūda municipality deal with the aftermath of a severe weekend storm after the municipality declared an emergency situation, LRT reported, citing Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas.

“The storm’s impact in Lithuania remains serious. Some people are still without electricity, while reaching remote homesteads is difficult. The responsible services are fully mobilised and are urgently clearing the damage. However, the process is lengthy,” Kaunas said on Facebook.

He said he had received a request from Kazlų Rūda Mayor Mantas Varaška and that the army would assist residents of the municipality, where an emergency situation has been declared.

Varaška told BNS on Monday that without an emergency declaration, the municipality could not call in statutory organisations or soldiers. He said the municipality was facing a drinking water crisis, while some roads were impassable and residents needed food deliveries. Because mobile communications had not been restored everywhere, the municipality did not know how many people required assistance.

According to electricity distribution operator ESO, about 82,000 customers were still without power late on Monday. ESO chief Renaldas Radvila said the weekend storm was more than one-third more intense than a storm two years earlier, making it harder to restore services quickly.

He said the hardest-hit districts were Utena, Kaunas, Vilnius and Panevėžys, where restoring electricity to the last customers could take until Saturday, August 29. The number of outages peaked on Saturday evening, when 268,000 customers were without electricity.

Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said after an interinstitutional meeting on Monday that the storm had exposed long-standing problems in the state and expressed regret that the damage could not be cleared more quickly.