The EU has said that flooding in central Europe happening simultaneously alongside wildfires in Portugal showed climate breakdown in action.
This is even as Soldiers, emergency workers and volunteers battled through the night to reinforce defences around Wrocław, Poland’s third biggest city. More than five times the average rainfall for the whole of September has fallen in five days on swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, triggering devastating flooding that has killed 23 people in four countries.
In Portugal for instance, the government declared a “state of calamity” late on Tuesday night as dozens of wildfires continued to burn across northern parts of the country. The wildfires have killed at least seven people, destroyed dozens of houses and torn through tens of thousands of hectares of forest and scrubland.
Visiting Wrocław, a city of 600,000 people where the level of the Odra (Oder) River is not due to peak until Thursday, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, told a crisis meeting that “a lot happened” overnight but more needed to be done.
Sandbags were passed along lines of residents and civil protection workers to fortify riverbanks and buildings, helped by some of the 14,000 soldiers sent to the worst-hit areas. Army helicopters dumped more bags to strengthen emergency dams.
“We are concentrating on keeping the Oder within its banks,” said the Polish interior minister, Tomasz Siemoniak. “We have a very difficult dozen or so hours ahead of us.”
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Finance minister Andrzej Domański said 2bn złotys (£395m) had been set aside for dealing with the aftermath of the floods, which have destroyed roads and bridges, submerged whole neighbourhoods and caused billions of euros of damage.
Austria has tripled its federal disaster fund to €1bn (£840m), the chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said on Wednesday, describing the past few days as “enormously challenging” and causing “great suffering and unimaginable destruction”.
Seven people have died in Poland, seven in Romania, five in Austria and four in the Czech Republic, officials said on Wednesday, with several reported missing, as Storm Boris moved steadily westward to start threatening northern Italy.
Czech media reported the latest victim there was a 70-year-old woman from a village near the north-eastern town of Jesenik who was found 20 metres from her house after leaving an evacuation centre on Sunday to return to her home.
The Polish defence ministry said more than 14,000 soldiers had been deployed to flood-hit regions, with the armed forces using helicopters to evacuate people and strengthen flood defences, while drones monitored the situation from above.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, would travel to Wrocław on Thursday to meet the political leaders of Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, the commission said on Wednesday.
In Hungary, authorities opened a dam in the country’s north-west to direct water from the Lajta River into an emergency reservoir to protect the town of Mosonmagyaróvár and continued to shore up flood defences in the capital, Budapest.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
