SARAJEVO: Tens of thousands of people in Bosnia were still without electricity Friday due to a snowstorm, as rescuers found the body of a weather station employee dead on a mountain.
The storm, which started on Sunday night, initally left more than 170,000 people without electricity and cut off parts of the Balkan nation.
Although the weather has improved across the country, local officials and power firms said thousands of people were still cut off by blocked roads and tens of thousands of households were without electricity, notably in northern Bosnia.
Meanwhile, a weather station employee was found dead in the snow on a mountain near the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Friday after a four-day search, rescue services said.
The 46-year-old man, who had been walking towards the station located at the Bjelasnica mountain summit at 2,067 metres (6,781 feet) altitude, was reported missing by a colleague at midday Tuesday.
The Sarajevo region mountain rescue services “found a body on the southeast flank of Bjelasnica that we believe to be of the missing employee”, the leader of the rescue operation Nermin Demir said on Facebook.
More than 50 rescuers had joined in the search, which was particularly difficult due to thick fog and strong winds.
The snow cover at the Bjelasnica summit measured 174 centimetres (68 inches) while snowdrifts were up to three meters high, according to rescuers.
The situation was also difficult in many villages around Knezevo, 140 kilometres (87 miles) northwest of Sarajevo, whose mayor Goran Borojevic declared a state of emergency.
“Teams from the electricity company are repairing outages to villages, but it’s difficult to reach some outage areas in a layer of snow more than a metre high,“ he told the Bosnian Serb television channel RTRS.
