September 15, 2024 | 13.04
READING TIME: 2 minutes
Torrential rains are hitting the‘Central and Eastern Europe for the passage of the storm Boris. The floods caused thousands of evacuations and catastrophic damage. After four people died yesterday in Romania, the death toll rose today, with one person drowning in Poland and a firefighter dead in Austria. Four people are also missing in the Czech Republic.
The shocking images of the floods show entire neighborhoods flooded, streets submerged, residents with water up to their shoulders in Romaniasand dams to limit rising waters, people taking refuge in a school in Poland. The storm caused massive power outages and disruptions in the transportation network.
The Romanian Interior Ministry reported that “more than 5,000 families and more than 15,000 people have been affected in Galati and Vaslui counties.” In the northeast of theAustriaa firefighter died during an intervention, while in the Polish town of Glucholazy, on the border with the Czech Republic, the Biala Glucholaska river, in flood, overflowed its banks, flooding the town centre and the neighbourhoods along the river.
Thousands of people have been evacuated on both sides of the border, where hundreds of thousands of homes remained without electricity until this morning. Rail traffic between the Poland and the Czech Republic has been interrupted. The situation is particularly serious in the northeast, where the city of Opava has been evacuated due to the overflowing of the river of the same name.
Poland has deployed its army, including heavy equipment, to support firefighters and police, Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters. Czech electricity providers reported that 260,000 homes were without power due to flooding. In Austria, rail traffic was disrupted last night in parts of the country.
A subway line in Vienna was partially closed, with the entire network threatened by the Vienna River and the Danube Canal that runs through the Austrian capital. The region of the country most affected by the storm, Lower Austria (northeast), has been classified as a disaster zone. With 1.72 million inhabitants, it is the most populous in the country after Vienna.
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