Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Documents
XXVIII Brief report of the mayor, Zoltán Vas, on the state of the City November 28th, 1945 The deep-rooted will to live of the working people of Budapest, the nation-wide conjunction of forces is demonstrated in the great victory of democracy, in the fact that we have succeeded in avoiding a fatal famine, have averted an epidemic and have achieved considerable initial success in the reconstruction of Budapest. For my part I have co-operated in this work as the government commissioner of the Supply Services for Budapest, and the fact that on May 17th of this year the provisional General Assembly elected, in my person, a communist to be the mayor of Budapest is a mark of appreciation for the work of the Hungarian Communist Party. The first target of my efforts was the reaffirmation of working discipline, that municipal clerks and workers should work for the reconstruction of Budapest, with all their strength and skills, to implement the programme presented by the mayor to the provisional municipal authority that Budapest should rise more beautiful than ever before. This demanded, in the first place the removal of the obstructions of refuse and rubble from the streets of Budapest, the provision of water, electricity and gas, the reorganization of transport facilities, and the provision of shelter for the homeless. But let the figures speak for themselves: The waterworks have been almost entirely reconstructed, and compared to a water supply of 7,700,000 cubic metres in October 1942, we have reached the 6,700,000 cubic metres mark in October this year. The pumping stations have also been rebuilt. We need no longer fear that in times of high water the Danube will flood the city through the sewers. We have also done a certain amount of work in the field of flood-prevention, and are now much better equipped for emergencies than in the spring of this year, when the waters of the Danube devastated large areas. The electricity output was 440,000 kilowatts daily in May this year. We have now attained 1,400,000 kilowatts. This is more than the output in October last year. 870 street lamps were in operation in July this year; 4,688 street lamps are working today. Gas output has grown fourfold since May, and with an output of 7 million cubic metres we have achieved 70 per cent of peace-time production. It is only the coal shortage which prevents us today from reaching the peace-time level. But in the future we shall not rely solely on coal for increasing the production of gas. The city engineers and specialists are working hard to make the natural gas resources of Lispe (in south-west Hungary) available to the people of Budapest as soon as possible. Organic household refuse, one of our most acute problems up to May, has been finally cleared away from the streets of the city. The normal peace-time system of house refuse collection has been very largely reintroduced. The clearance of rubble, amounting to 15,000 cubic metres in June, was increased to 100,000 cubic metres by October. In the past six months we have cleared 5,319 large waggonloads and 17,813 large coal waggonloads of refuse and rubble from the streets of Budapest. An enormous amount of work has also been done in the reconstruction of damaged buildings. The roofs of 10,000 buildings were repaired between May and November. The repair of another 2,500 roofs is in progress. This is 65 per cent of all damaged roofs. The 119
