In recent months, Croatia’s been through a lot on the weather front. We’ve seen horrifying wildfires, insane storms and floods of Biblical proportions – come to think of it, it’s only appropriate to resort to a themed analogy and say the situation resembled a proper 10-plagues list. The most unnerving thing is that you can never know what comes next… And yet, when it comes to Croatia, there’s a certain ill-tempered constant on whose destructive potential we can always count on: bura.
The forceful north wind is no joke in these parts. Anyone living on the Adriatic has felt bura’s tough love on many occasion; when her majesty plays up, trees get knocked down, roofs fly off, highways get closed for traffic, and attempting to pass over Krk or Maslenica bridges is out of the question.
Bura can reach speeds of over 200 kmh – to be precise, up to 307 kmh. That’s the fastest bura speed recorded in Croatian history, when a speed-measuring device on the A1 highway between Sveti Rok tunnel and Maslenica managed to stand up to this particular force of nature without getting swept into oblivion. While this figure is considered unofficial, the second highest stands as equally impressive: 248 kmh, recorded on Maslenica bridge in 1998.
One of the locations that regularly get merciless whips of bura is Pag island. You might remember this video that marked the occasion when the wind speed on Pag bridge reached 216 kmh in January 2017:
It hasn’t even been a full year since the footage was taken, and poor Pag already got another heavy dose of bura. On October 6, 2017, the searing force kicked it up a notch and knocked down a wind turbine on the island. Provided by Crometeo, here we have a wonderful visual representation of irony in its purest form:
Wind turbines knocked down by wind. Whoever installed the unfortunate device made a terrible mistake of underestimating the energy source. It wasn’t even a question of enforcing the foundations, as the following photo clearly shows the whole structure just snapped in half like a fragile twig:
Morale of the story? You don’t mess with bura, because once you do, you end up in a situation nicely summed up by a certain commenter on Facebook: “F**k, yet another thing we’ll need to pay for.”
