MAN IS RUINING THE PLACE The Danube is falling, specialists are growing

I am part of the generation that grew up with the show "Cotele apelor Dunării", broadcast on the radio. I admit without shame: when it started, I would change the station and since there were not many options, I would often turn off the radio. For a child, it was the most effective sleeping pill ever invented for a midday nap. Figures, localities, flows and levels that seemed to interest no one.

It is clear that I was wrong. If I had listened more carefully, I would probably be a hydrologist on Facebook and Tik Tok today.

For a few days, Romania has discovered a new professional category. After epidemiologists, military strategists, energy experts, political scientists and occasional meteorologists, keyboard hydrologists have appeared. Everyone knows what the flow of the Danube is, how much water needs to be released, what happens at Cernavodă, how the soil behaves after the rains and, obviously, who is to blame for what is and what is not.

Interestingly, the faculties that actually train such specialists do not produce armies of graduates. In Bucharest, the Water Engineering and Hydrotechnical Development programs have, every year, several dozen budgeted places, and the entire Faculty of Hydrotechnics puts out approximately a hundred places for all specializations. With such figures, it would be impossible to explain the avalanche of experts flooding social networks. Therefore, there must be another school.

The only plausible explanation is that the real faculty was the show "Cotele apelor Dunării". It does not matter whether we are talking about the level of the river, the operation of hydroelectric power plants, the functioning of the Danube-Black Sea Canal or the nuclear power plant at Cernavodă. In a few minutes, the internet produces hundreds of analyses, all formulated with a certainty that would make any academic committee envious.

The truth, however, is less spectacular. Hydrology is not just about looking at a photo of the banks of the Danube. Behind a decision lie measurements, historical series, mathematical models, flows, precipitation, infiltration, the degree of soil saturation, forecasts and dozens of variables that most of us do not even suspect. Just as medicine is not learned from a video clip and nuclear engineering is not limited to a comment on the internet, neither is the management of a European river done from behind a keyboard.

But social networks have changed the rules. It is no longer who knows who counts, but who speaks first. It is no longer experience that counts, but the number of shares. And if the opinion is categorical enough, it quickly becomes "truth”, regardless of the arguments.

Perhaps the radio show had and still has another purpose than the obvious one. It reminds us, every day, that the Danube has its own rules and that nature does not take into account our opinions. The flow rate does not increase or decrease depending on the number of comments on Facebook, and the water level cannot be determined by online voting.

Perhaps, before we all turn into hydrologists, it would be worth doing one simple thing: to listen to the people who actually studied for years for this, even if the show about the Danube water levels once seemed to us the most boring on the program schedule. Otherwise, the Danube takes its course. Only the levels of opinions continue to reach historic levels.