Death toll rises as storm lashes central, eastern Europe

AFP | Glucholazy

The Daily Tribune - www.newsofbahrain.com

Email: editor@newsofbahrain.com

One person has drowned in Poland and an Austrian fireman has died responding to floods, authorities said yesterday, as Storm Boris lashed central and eastern Europe with torrential rains.

Since Thursday, swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia have been hit by high winds and unusually heavy rainfall.

The rains have flooded streets and submerged entire neighbourhoods in some places, while shutting down public transport and electricity in others. Romanians waded through armpit-high water to safety, Poles sought shelter in schools and Czechs hurriedly put up sand dykes in an effort to keep the water at bay. Sunday’s deaths bring the overall toll from the storm to seven, with thousands evacuated across the continent.

In Romania, a body was found on Sunday, after four people were reported killed earlier. Four more people were reported missing in the Czech Republic.

“The water came into the house, it destroyed the walls, everything,” Sofia Basalic, 60, a resident of Romania’s village of Pechea, in the hard-hit region of Galati, told AFP. “It took the chickens, the rabbits, everything.

It took the oven, the washing machine, the refrigerator. I have nothing left,” she said. On Saturday, four people died in floods in southeastern Romania, with the bodies found in the worst-affected region, Galati in the southeast. Another body was found in the same region on Sunday.

“We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences,” Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis said. Hundreds of people have been rescued across 19 parts of the country, emergency services said, releasing a video of flooded homes in a village by the Danube river.

“This is a catastrophe of epic proportions,” said Emil Dragomir, mayor of Slobozia Conachi, a village in Galati, where he said 700 homes had been flooded. Romania’s interior minister said more than 5,000 households and 15,000 people were affected in the region.

Snow in September

In Austria, some areas of the Tyrol region were blanketed by up to a metre (three feet) of snow -- an exceptional situation for mid-September, which saw temperatures of up to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) last week. Rail services were suspended in the country’s east early Sunday.

Firefighters have intervened around 150 times in Vienna since Friday to clear roads blocked by storm debris and pump water from cellars, local media reported. Neighbouring Slovakia has declared a state of emergency in the capital Bratislava. Heavy rains are expected to