No one in Aleksandrovac can name the bridge investor

Part of the bank at a bridge site in 29. novembra street, in the middle of Aleksandrovac, gave way in the early hours of July 29. The bridge there is being rebuilt. Nobody was hurt. The ground opened under a parked truck belonging to the contractor, leaving the vehicle tilted over the drop, and the portal Nova reports it was pulled out around four hours after midnight.

Police banned pedestrians from crossing the bridge and cordoned off the site. Residents of two homes next to it were evacuated, described by Beta and N1 as two houses. Inspection services and police have opened an inquiry, and their findings are still pending.

Who is the investor, and who drew the plans

Two days after the collapse, the argument moved off the site and into local politics. Dragisa Stamenkovic, a councillor for the Serbia Against Violence list in the Aleksandrovac municipal assembly, said on July 31 that residents have no idea who is behind the work that caved in outside their front doors.

“She blames some people who are unknown to us, because we do not know who the investor is or who the designer is, and she invokes the responsibility of exactly those people. Who are they? They are phantoms, clearly”

The “she” in that quote is Jelena Paunovic, the mayor of Aleksandrovac, who said after the collapse that responsibility rests with the investor and the contractor and that the two of them are obliged to cover the damage. The municipality, she said, has urged that the pedestrian crossing be reopened as soon as possible.

According to information published earlier, the investor is the state company Putevi Srbije (Roads of Serbia). No municipal statement so far has named the designer, or the firm carrying out the work.

Why the names have to be public

This is not idle curiosity. Serbia’s Planning and Construction Act requires the contractor to put up a board on the site, in plain view, listing the structure being built and the investor, designer and contractor behind it. That board is not a formality. It is the first piece of paper any damaged neighbour has when they start chasing compensation.

If the board in 29. novembra street carries those details as the law requires, the whole quarrel about “phantoms” is settled by a single photograph. If the board is missing or incomplete, that is a separate failure, entirely independent of whatever the inspectors decide caused the ground to give way. The political half of the story, who accuses whom in the assembly chamber, stops there, and the half with documents and deadlines begins.

The distinction matters most to the families pulled out of the two evacuated homes. A damage claim is not filed against the municipality but against the investor and the contractor, and to file it, those parties have to be named. Until they are, every appeal to their responsibility lacks an address.

The house that became unsafe afterwards

Stamenkovic also warned about the immediate effect on nearby buildings:

“What is unsafe here is above all a private house that was fairly safe and far from the scene, but with this latest event it too is in great danger”

That assessment has not been confirmed by any engineering report. Which is precisely why the inspection matters: it has to establish whether the stability of the surrounding ground has been compromised, to what degree, and whether the evacuation of the two homes stays in force.

What happens next

Three things can be measured in the days ahead, whichever way the argument goes in the municipal chamber:

• the inspectors’ finding on the cause of the collapse, which had not been released by the time this article was published
• a decision on when the pedestrian crossing reopens, since the ban has cut central Aleksandrovac in half
• the public naming of the investor, designer and contractor, without which residents’ damage claims have nowhere to go

The Aleksandrovac assembly has not scheduled a special session on the site. The first official document that will settle anything is the inspection report, not the statements traded across the council floor.