GLUCHOLAZY: One person has drowned in Poland and an Austrian fireman has died responding to floods, authorities said Sunday, as Storm Boris lashed central and eastern Europe with torrential rains.
Since Thursday, swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia have been hit by high winds and unusually heavy rainfall.
The rains have flooded streets and submerged entire neighbourhoods in some places, while shutting down public transport and electricity in others.
Romanians waded through armpit-high water to safety, Poles sought shelter in schools, and Czechs hurriedly put up sand dykes in an effort to keep the water at bay.
Sunday's deaths bring the overall toll from the storm to seven, with thousands evacuated across the continent.
In Romania, a body was found on Sunday, after four people were reported killed earlier. Four more people were reported missing in the Czech Republic.
"The water came into the house, it destroyed the walls, everything," Sofia Basalic, 60, a resident of Romania's village of Pechea said, in the hard-hit region of Galati. "It took the chickens, the rabbits, everything. It took the oven, the washing machine, the refrigerator. I have nothing left," she said.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday morning that "we have the first confirmed death by drowning, in the Klodzko region" on the Polish-Czech border in the southwest of the country, which has been hit hardest by the floods. Around 1,600 people have been evacuated in Klodzko, and Polish authorities have called in the army to support firefighters.
Separately, a fireman in northeastern Austria died in floods in the Lower Austria region, which has been classified as a natural disaster zone.
Emergency services had made nearly 5,000 interventions overnight in the state of Lower Austria, where flooding had trapped many residents in their homes.
Polish authorities shut the Golkowice border crossing with the Czech Republic after a river flooded its banks on Saturday, as well as closing several roads and halting trains on the line linking the towns of Prudnik and Nysa. In the Czech Republic, police reported four people were missing Sunday.
Three were in a car that was swept into a river in the northeastern town of Lipova-Lazne, and another man was missing after being swept away by floods in the southeast. A dam in the south of the country burst its banks, flooding towns and villages downstream. In the village of Velke Hostice, residents put up a wall of sandbags 500 metres long in an effort to hold back the rising waters of the River Opava. — AFP
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