By Kuba Stezycki, Janis Laizans and Radovan Stoklasa
WROCLAW, Poland/OSTRAVA, Czech Republic (Reuters) – 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.
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 5, 6 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, around 60 kilometres 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 1 metre 10 centimetres, 1 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 Development, Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz, said 1.5 billion zlotys ($390.46 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.
‘COMBAT CONDITIONS’
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,” Nysa resident Sabina Jakubowska, 45, told Reuters.
In neighbouring Czech Republic, 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, told Reuters 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 one billion euros ($1.1 billion).
Belica said damage in his region alone would reach tens of billions of crowns (over $1 billion). The Czech Insurance Association said the first estimate of the cost of flood damage on insured property is 17 billion crowns ($753 million).
In Hungary, in the towns of Visegrad and Szentendre, north of Budapest, authorities have put mobile dams in place to limit flooding from the Danube.
Budapest is preparing for waters peaking near record levels, and has closed Margaret Island, a recreational area with hotels and restaurants.
In Slovakia, Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said the Danube had peaked at nearly 10 metres overnight and water levels would now slowly fall. He said damage caused by floods throughout the country was estimated at 20 million euros.
($1 = 3.8416 zlotys)
(Reporting by Janis Laizans and Kacper Pempel in Lewin Brzeski, Radovan Stoklasa and david W Cerny in Ostrava Marek Strzelecki, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk and Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw, Jason Hovet and Jan Lopatka in Prague, Krisztina Than in Budapest, Francois Murphy and Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich in Vienna, Writing by Jason Hovet and Alan Charlish; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Ros Russell and David Gregorio)
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