AFP Videos – France
Storm Boris wreaks havoc in Central Europe: six dead and extensive damage
Torrential rains, spectacular and deadly floods, evacuations by the thousands: Storm Boris is wreaking havoc in Central and Eastern Europe, and its toll has risen to at least six dead and several missing. This storm has caused damage and catastrophic flooding in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Romania. After the death of four people in Romania on Saturday, the toll rose on Sunday, with one person drowned in Poland and a firefighter dead in Austria. In addition, four people are missing in the Czech Republic. The impressive images of these floods taken by AFP photographers show entire neighborhoods flooded, streets submerged in water, residents with water up to their armpits in Romania, sand dikes to limit the rising waters, people taking refuge in a school in Poland. The storm has caused massive power outages, disruptions to the transport network and mass evacuations of residents across these countries. In Romania, emergency services announced on Saturday that they had found the bodies of four people during a search operation in the worst-hit region, Galati (southeast), where thousands of homes have been affected. The Romanian Interior Ministry reported “more than 5,000 households and more than 15,000 people affected in the counties of Galati and Vaslui”. In northeastern Austria, a firefighter died while responding to flooding, regional authorities said on Sunday. In the Polish town of Glucholazy, on the Polish-Czech border, the flooded Biala Glucholaska River overflowed the dikes, flooding the city centre and neighbouring neighbourhoods. – “We are sinking” – “We are sinking,” the mayor of Glucholazy told reporters, calling on residents to leave areas threatened by floodwaters. Thousands of people have been evacuated and evacuations are continuing on both sides of the border, where hundreds of thousands of homes remained without power Sunday morning. Rail traffic between Poland and the Czech Republic has been cut off, PAP reported. “We have the first confirmed death by drowning, in the Klodzko region,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday morning, as he has been traveling through the southwest of the country, which is the worst hit by the floods, since Saturday. In the Czech Republic, police reported four people missing: three people in a car that fell into a river in the northeastern town of Lipova-Lazne and a man who disappeared after being swept away by a flooded river. The situation is particularly serious in the northeastern part of the country, where much of the town of Opava has been evacuated due to the overflowing Opava River. In Poland, the town of Ladek Zdroj has been left without road access and 1,600 people in the Klodzko region have had to be evacuated. “We believe there will be more evacuations,” Tusk said, again calling on people “not to refuse to evacuate.” Poland’s prime minister announced the deployment of Starlink satellite internet systems to provide communication to places that have remained cut off. Poland has sent the army to support firefighters and police on the ground, also equipped with heavy equipment, Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters. Czech electricity suppliers said on Sunday morning that 260,000 homes were without electricity due to the flooding. In Austria, rail traffic was interrupted overnight from Saturday to Sunday in part of the country. – Residents trapped – A line of the Vienna metro was partially closed, the network being threatened by the Wien River and the Danube Canal crossing the Austrian capital. Sand dams have been erected inside the tunnels. The region of the country most affected by the storm, Lower Austria (northeast) has been classified as a natural disaster zone. With 1.72 million inhabitants, it is the most populous in the country after Vienna. “Hydrologists are predicting extremely heavy rain in the coming hours, up to 60 millimetres,” warned its deputy governor Stephan Pernkopf. Nearly 5,000 interventions took place overnight in Lower Austria, where residents are currently trapped in their homes. Flooding linked to heavy rain is expected to increase in central and western Europe in a world facing an average warming of 1.5°C, IPCC climate experts said in a 2022 report. The world is already considered to be at least 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial era (1850-1900).bur-sw-lp/bpi
