Bulgaria is once again under water. It is difficult to count the number of floods in recent years. After a number of rainfalls, this time in eastern and southern Bulgaria, whole villages were flooded. There were victims, hundreds of houses became unusable and landslides affected whole neighborhoods.

Television images are shocking – elderly people weeping, feeling completely powerless against raging rivers and overflowing dams, trying to save the little possessions left after previous floods.

In recent years, these images are often repeated like a nightmare you just cannot get rid of. Journalists, experts and victims continue to ask if we were powerless against climate change, or whether nature was having a revenge on us, or maybe it was another case of human error? There is a little bit of everything. Global warming is certainly a fact. The boundary between the four seasons in Bulgaria has become fuzzy and torrential rains often sweep through the country. But climate change is not something new, so trying to ignore it makes us surprised every time a flood hits. This week’s floods are a déjà vu for the Varna district of Asparuhovo, the village of Biser in the Rhodope Mountains and the town of Misia. Both now and then no one is responsible and the behavior of people has not changed too. There are no people to have made flood insurance for the small sum of 50 euro a year. All river beds in Bulgaria are clogged with rubbish and even forests grow in some of them. Meanwhile, the forests in the mountains disappear because of intensive illegal logging. Nature takes its revenge because of our reckless behavior and state authorities do not care. Some officials even participate in illegal logging, a source of some meager incomes coming from the sale of timber to neighboring countries. The authorities are careless when it comes to the management of dams in the country. Just a month before the major flood in December, ownership of more than 250 dams in the country was not clear, as well as it was not clear what the status of dikes and other protective equipment was. No preventive actions were taken.

In reports from the affected areas of the country desperate people left without a roof kept saying: "The state is doing absolutely nothing." Aren’t we the state? The saddest thing is that floods remain a nine day’s wonder in this country and no measures would be taken to prevent the next flood from happening and we would have not learned our lesson.