EU warns on climate crisis amid floods and wildfire
Soldiers, emergency workers and volunteers battled through the night to reinforce defences around Wrocław, Poland’s third biggest city, as the EU said flooding in central Europe happening simultaneously alongside wildfires in Portugal showed climate breakdown in action.
More than five times the average rainfall for the whole of September has fallen in five days on swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, causing devastating flooding that has killed 23 people in four countries.
In Portugal, the government declared a “state of calamity” late on Tuesday night as dozens of wildfires continued to burn across northern parts of the country. The wildfires have killed at least seven people, destroyed dozens of houses and torn through tens of thousands of hectares of forest and scrubland.
Visiting Wrocław, a city of 600,000 people where the level of the Oder River is not due to peak until today, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, told a crisis meeting that “a lot happened” overnight but more needed to be done.
Residents and civil protection workers fortified riverbanks with sandbags, helped by some of the 14,000 soldiers sent to the worst-hit areas. Army helicopters worked to strengthen emergency dams.
“We are concentrating on keeping the Oder within its banks,” said the Polish interior minister, Tomasz Siemoniak. “We have a very difficult dozen or so hours ahead of us.”
In Strasbourg, the EU's crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarčič, said the flooding in central Europe and deadly forest fires in Portugal were joint proof of climate breakdown. “This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm,” Lenarčič told MEPs.