Romania has ruptured a dyke on the River Danube to save homes elsewhere from floods and launched a 24-hour watch on the bulging embankments during Orthodox Easter.
As the swollen Danube menaced scores of villages and towns across south-eastern Europe, Romanian crews made last-ditch efforts to firm up sandbagged embankments of the river in 10 locations.
The banks of the Danube were unlikely to hold out much longer at the river’s delta near the towns of Caraorman, Crisan and Sulina, said Environment Minister Sulfina Barbu.
”We decided to create a breach in the dyke of Litoral Cord in order to flood an uninhabited area and reduce the pressure on the three localities,” said Barbu.
The 10 most-endangered locations along the Danube included the southern town of Dolj where there were more than 5 000 flood victims and hundreds of destroyed houses.
Romanian Interior Minister Vasile Blaga urged local authorities and citizens along the Danube to man the flood defences despite their Easter celebrations.
”We don’t expect a significant fall in the level of the Danube during the weekend. This is why the municipalities, the residents and the police have to monitor and reinforce the dykes,” he told a press conference.
”It’s very important to remain watchful for 24 hours a day, in particular during Easter,” said Barbu.
Some victims ”unfortunately” decided to return to their homes, defying the danger posed by the flood waters, Blaga said.
As a result, the total number of people evacuated had fallen by about 1 000 to about 5 430, he said.
Overall, 146 localities in 12 Romanian municipalities had been flooded, nearly 800 houses damaged and 42 000ha of arable land inundated.
Besides Romania, the floods forced evacuations and spread havoc in Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary.
In the northern Bulgarian city of Nikopol, 68 people were forced out of their homes as the Danube breached its banks and flowed into the downtown area.
Bulgarian authorities said they feared landslides caused by the large volumes of water seeping underground.
At the main Bulgarian port on the Danube in the north-eastern town of Ruse, many riverside buildings were flooded after the water rose to nearly 9m, the highest level since 1970.
Flood waters were also rising in the eastern towns of Oriahovo, Kozlodoui and Silistra, but had begun to subside slightly further west in the city of Vidin.
In Serbia, the floods had waterlogged about 3 000 homes and spilled across 220 000ha of farmland, according to government estimates announced late on Thursday.
”The water level on the Tisza in Hungary has stabilised, but on our side of the border it has started to rise and has begun to test our dykes,” Serbian Agriculture Minister Ivan Dulic-Markovic told B92 television. A second line of defence had been erected along the Tisza, she said.
The rising Sava River, whose confluence with the Danube is in central Belgrade, presented a new threat, the minister said.
In Hungary, dozens of people and thousands of animals were evacuated in the south-east after a dyke cracked on the swollen River Koros.
Eighty-seven people in the region of Nagyret were forced to move along with more than 10 000 poultry and other animals, Tibor Dobson of the National Catastrophe Prevention Agency told MTI news agency. ”The measure is precautionary,” Dobson said.
The army has ordered reinforcements to the sparsely populated region.
The Tisza and its tributaries were threatening to peak in the night ahead in the southern Hungarian town of Szeged. More than 25 500 emergency workers — including soldiers, firemen and volunteers using helicopters, tractors and pumps — were fighting to save the settlement.
The Hungarian government estimated that the cost of the damage caused by the floods up until the end of May would amount to 40-billion forint ($188-million).
The number of people displaced from flooded regions in Hungary over the past few weeks has now topped 600. — AFP
