Central Europe prepares for further flooding as rivers rise
As swollen rivers continued to rise, volunteers and emergency workers in towns and cities across a swathe of central Europe were reinforcing defences against floods that have killed at least 21 people in four countries.
Storm Boris has dumped up to five times the average September rainfall on parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia in four days, submerging entire neighbourhoods and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate.
Seven people have died in Romania, six in Poland, five in Austria and three in the Czech Republic, officials said yesterday, with several missing. The rain was easing in some areas but water levels in others were not expected to peak for several days.
The Danube River had peaked in Slovakia, the environment minister, Tomáš Taraba, said, leaving parts of Bratislava’s old town flooded.
The Danube was still rising in Hungary, including by about a metre every 24 hours in Budapest. Mobile dams were in place at the historic towns of Visegrád and Szentendre, north of Budapest.
Tram lines and roads alongside the river, as well as the popular Margaret Island, have been closed and a million sandbags distributed.
Authorities to the east, in eastern Germany, were also taking precautions, with mobile flood protection walls set up in some areas to protect Dresden’s old city as the Elbe River rose steadily. The river was expected to peak by midweek.
The mayor of the historic city of Wrocław in Poland, Jacek Sutryk, said yesterday that buses had been prepared for an eventual evacuation. “Today we will also be further reinforcing embankments in the [Oder] river basin,” he added.