Volunteers and emergency workers raced to secure river banks in the historic Polish city of Wroclaw on Tuesday, as residents elsewhere in central Europe tallied the cost of floods that have wreaked havoc and killed at least 21 people.
The deluge has left a trail of destruction from Romania to Poland. While waters were receding in many areas, others were nervously waiting for rivers to burst their banks.
The Czech-Polish border areas were among the worst-hit since the weekend, as gushing, debris-filled rivers devastated historic towns, collapsing bridges and destroying houses.
Flooding has killed seven people in Romania, where waters have receded since the weekend. Six were dead in Poland, five in Austria, and three in the Czech Republic. Tens of thousands of Czech and Polish households remained without power or fresh water.
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Wroclaw, the third largest city in Poland, prepared for peaking water along the Oder and Bystrzyca rivers.
In a northern suburb, 44-year-old IT programmer Michal Nakiewicz was one of dozens of volunteers helping emergency services pile up sandbags on the bank of the Bystrzyca.
“I saw that both parents and children were helping to pour sand. I even saw five-, six-year-olds, so quite a gathering,” he said. “I think that there may not be enough hands in the services, so every pair of hands helps.”
The city’s zoo called for volunteers to help pack sandbags to protect animal enclosures and employees and volunteers began to move some of the 450,000 books from the city’s main church archive to higher floors of the Archdiocesan Archives building.
In Lewin Brzeski, about 60km south of Wroclaw, flood waters had already arrived and continued to rise.
Townspeople waded through waist-high water in some places, while others moved through streets on rafts as emergency services took them to safety.
“I live down there, there is about one metre ten centimetres, one metre 20 centimetres of water on the courtyard and it is rising all the time,” said Marek Karas (63), adding he thought not enough had been done to protect the area from flooding since a severe deluge in 1997.
“In 27 years they haven’t done much in this section, all those who governed up to now, there are not enough storage reservoirs.”
Poland’s minister for funds and regional Ddevelopment, Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz, said 1.5 billion zlotys (about €350 million) from Poland’s European Union funds would be redirected to reconstruction, with another 3.5 billion zlotys potentially allocated to building embankments, reservoirs and dams.
Overnight, volunteers helped rescue workers heave sandbags to build up the broken embankment around Nysa, a city of more than 40,000 people in southwestern Poland.
Some residents returned to check their homes after evacuations on Monday, despite assurances from prime minister Donald Tusk that authorities would act “ruthlessly” against looters.
“[They] assured us that services would take care of our belongings and property. But we are afraid ... because we are already hearing that looters have become active,” said Nysa resident Sabina Jakubowska (45).
In neighbouring Czech Republic, regional governor Josef Belica said 15,000 people had been evacuated in the northeastern Moravia-Silesia region, one of two badly affected. Helicopters were delivering aid to areas cut off by floodwaters.
Michal Marianek, director of an old people’s home in the regional capital Ostrava, said staff had moved residents to a higher floor for two nights and cared for them without electricity.
“In those combat conditions we managed, provisional menus and so on,” he said, adding residents were now being moved to other homes.
In nearby Trebovice, restaurant owner Veronika Jahodova said her establishment was seriously damaged. “The flood, the waves came, twice and basically everything that was inside we found in the park a few blocks away.”
Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS estimated losses from flooding across central Europe at between several hundred million euros to more than €1 billion. – Reuters