Soldiers dropped sandbags
from military helicopters to reinforce river embankments and evacuated
residents as the worst flooding in years spread Tuesday to a broad swath of
Central Europe, taking lives and destroying homes.
Heavy flooding has affected a
large part of the region in recent days, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia
and Austria. There have been at least 16 deaths reported in the flooding, which
follow heavy rainfall across the region.
Other places are now bracing
for the flood waves to hit them, including two central European gems: Budapest,
the Hungarian capital on the Danube River, and Wroclaw, a city in southwestern
Poland on the Oder River, its old town filled with architectural gems.
Hungary’s government of Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán deployed soldiers to reinforce barriers along the Danube,
and thousands of volunteers assisted in filling sandbags in dozens of riverside
settlements.
In Budapest, authorities
closed the city’s lower quays, which are expected to be breached by rising
waters later in the day. The lower half of the city’s iconic Margaret Island
was also closed.
In Wroclaw, firefighters and
soldiers spent the night using sandbags to reinforce river embankments. The
city zoo, located along the Oder, appealed for volunteers to fill sandbags on
Tuesday morning.
“We and our animals will be
extremely grateful for your help,” the zoo said in its appeal.
The city said it expected the
flood wave to peak there around Friday, though some had predicted that would
happen sooner. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk met with a crisis team early
Tuesday and said there are contradictory forecasts from meteorologists.
Tusk’s government has
declared a state of natural disaster across the affected region of southern
Poland.
To the south of Wroclaw,
residents spent the night fighting to save Nysa, a town of 44,000 people, after
the Nysa Klodzka River broke its banks the day before. The town mayor Kordian
Kolbiarz said 2,000 “women, men, children, the elderly” came out to try to save
their town from the rising waters, forming a human chain that passed sandbags
to the river bank.
“We simply … did everything
we could,” Kolbiarz wrote on Facebook. “This chain of people fighting for our
Nysa was incredible. Thank you. We fought for Nysa. Our home. Our families. Our
future.”
In the Czech Republic, waters
have been receding in the two hardest-hit, northeast regions. The government
approved the deployment of 2,000 troops to help with clean-up efforts. The
damage is expected to reach billions of euros.
The Czech government also
scrambled to help local authorities organize regional elections on Friday and
Saturday as several schools and other buildings serving as polling stations
have been badly damaged. However, a planned evacuation of some 1,000 in the
town of Veseli nad Luznici could be postponed as the waters had not reached
critical levels so far.