Floods affecting Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Austria due to torrential rains have left at least 13 people dead in central and eastern Europe.
The rains associated with Storm Boris have left the worst scars in Romania, where the death toll from “historic” flooding rose to six on Monday. All the deaths were in the eastern Galati county, where dozens of people had to be evacuated.
Romania’s Interior Ministry estimates that more than 15,000 people have been affected by the severe storm, and police have blocked traffic on several roads. Since last weekend, national and local authorities have deployed teams to rescue people trapped in the floodwaters and have set up temporary camps and modular housing.
Another affected country is Poland, where firefighters found the body of the third person killed in the floods in the south of the country on Monday. Since Friday evening, the storm has caused communications outages, isolated some towns and forced the evacuation of several thousand residents. According to data from the Polish Meteorological Institute, the water level of some rivers has exceeded all records recorded so far. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called an emergency Council of Ministers to define the scope of the declaration of a disaster area.
In Austria, two people have died due to severe flooding in their homes, bringing to three the death toll caused so far in the Alpine republic by storm Boris. These deaths are in addition to that of a firefighter who died last weekend while taking part in rescue operations.
In addition, some 800 people have been rescued by helicopter in the last few hours in Lower Austria, the largest and most populous state in the Alpine Republic, which has been declared a “disaster area”. In the same area, water has broken 12 dams, while 12,000 homes are without electricity and 23 towns have no drinking water. Firefighters, along with 300 soldiers and 13 helicopters, are working around the clock to rescue those trapped and reinforce the dams.
Meanwhile, the Czech Republic confirmed its first death on Monday. A person drowned in the Krasovka River. Seven others remain missing. The scale of the disaster in the country is comparable to that of 1997, when 50 people died. Persistent rain since Thursday has caused many rivers and streams to burst their banks, and dozens of places have now declared the third level (the maximum, on a three-level scale) of flood activity. More than 12,000 people have been evacuated in the country, where hundreds of thousands of homes are without electricity due to outages in high-voltage networks.
