A FIERCE heatwave across central and eastern Europe is being blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people, severe damage to vast swathes of crops and disruption to road and rail travel.
Hungary has issued the highest level of heat alert, urging children and elderly people to stay indoors. It ha started handing out bottles of water to pedestrians and drivers in the capital, Budapest, where temperatures have hovered around 35 degrees Celsius for several days.
Hungary has also now reduced the expected size of its agricultural harvest this year due to the intensely hot, dry weather, as have Germany and the Czech Republic.
For Romania and Ukraine, the heatwave has come on the heels of heavy rain and severe flooding in some areas.
The worst affected country is Russia, where more than 1,200 people drowned in June and almost 500 have drowned so far in July, many in rivers, ponds and reservoirs where swimming is banned, after drinking large amounts of alcohol.
“The majority of those drowned were drunk. The children died because adults simply did not look after them,” said Vadim Seryogin of Russia’s emergencies ministry.
Earlier this month, six children drowned in the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. Investigators believe the summer camp workers who were looking after them were drunk.
Drought has prompted 17 regions across Russia to declare a state of emergency. Nearly 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined – an area about the size of Hungary – causing an estimated €750 million worth of damage to the economy.
“This is a big problem, there has been no anomaly like this in our country for decades,” Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said during a visit to a village near the Ukrainian border. “We need to figure out how we can preserve at least some of the crop.”
The heatwave has also played havoc with transport across the region: a major motorway from Prague to Germany had to be closed for several days of repairs, and a Prague airport stopped accepting passenger flights after heat damage to the runway.
The air conditioning on one of Germany’s high-speed trains also failed in the soaring temperatures, leaving dozens of passengers suffering from heat exhaustion.
The hot spell is being blamed on interaction between an area of low pressure near the UK and high pressure over the Mediterranean, which is sucking hot air from Africa over central and eastern Europe. The weather pattern is expected to last well into next week.
From the Baltic to the Black Sea, people have been looking for ways to cool off. In Estonia, churches have been used as “heat shelters” for the elderly, while in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, teenagers have been using Facebook to organise ever-larger water fights in the city’s fountains. Sofia council has now banned all bathing in fountains.
The fierce heat has also triggered brief, powerful storms that have killed several people around the region.