Five dead as Storm Boris brings flooding ‘catastrophe’ to central Europe

At least five people have died across Poland and Romania, thousands have been evacuated and many remained stranded on Sunday after Storm Boris brought record rains and flash flooding to parts of central and eastern Europe.

Heavy rainfall began lashing central Europe on Friday as the slow-moving low-pressure system arrived, and it is expected to linger for days.

Storm Boris has brought a month’s worth of rain in just 24 hours to swathes of Poland, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary, along with fierce winds.

Four bodies, three women and one man, were recovered from Romania. It was the hardest-hit country, with flooding affecting 19 localities across eight counties.

Strong winds downed dozens of trees, damaging cars and blocking roads and traffic.

The southeastern region of Galati, a county in Romania, was especially badly hit, with at least 700 homes flooded and hundreds of people left stranded, according to Emil Dragomir, the mayor of Slobozia Conachi village in the county.

“This is a catastrophe of epic proportions,” Mr Dragomir said.

Romanian president Klaus Iohannis on Saturday acknowledged that they were reeling under the effects of the increasing impact of the climate crisis.

“We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences,” he said.

Authorities said on Saturday that the rainfall figures for the past 24 hours were the heaviest in 100 years.

A Black Hawk helicopter was deployed to Galati to help with the search-and-rescue missions.

In Poland and the Czech Republic, rivers burst their banks and several areas were deluged by water.

One person died by drowning in Klodzko county in southwest Poland and 1,600 people were evacuated. Several municipalities were flooded as rivers broke record high levels after days of heavy rainfall.

“The situation is very dramatic, it’s most dramatic in Klodzko county,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk told reporters on Sunday after meeting with the crisis management team in Klodzko town.

In southern Poland, authorities issued evacuation orders for homes in Glucholazy, a historic town near the Czech border, after the Biala Glicholaska River surged by two meters (6.5 feet) overnight into Saturday.

Poland’s interior minister Tomasz Siemoniak told TVN24 they would be “focusing on what the threats will be in the next few hours” after authorities received hundreds of incident reports.

In Krakow, Poland’s second-largest city, residents were given sandbags to protect their houses from flood waters.

More than 100,000 firefighters have been deployed in the Czech Republic as the authorities received nearly 2,900 incident reports on Friday, mostly related to fallen trees and flooding.

About 260,000 households were without power on Sunday morning in the entire country while traffic was halted on many roads, including the major D1 highway.

In the Czech city of Opava, up to 10,000 people out of a population of some 56,000 have been asked to leave their homes for higher ground. Rescuers used boats to transport people to safety in a neighbourhood flooded by the raging Opava River.

“There’s no reason to wait,” mayor Tomas Navratil told Czech public radio. He said the situation is worse than during the last devastating floods in 1997, known as the “flood of the century”.

Prime minister Petr Fiala said the focus is on saving lives, and his government will meet on Monday to assess the damage.

Footage released by the Czech Republic’s Fire and Rescue Service captured scenes of flooded streets in the southern municipality of Benesove nad Cernou, where two women, who had ignored evacuation orders, were rescued by boat.

Neighbouring Slovakia ordered a state of emergency in the capital, Bratislava, and Austria was pummelled by heavy rains, causing the rivers to swell.

Parts of the southern and eastern states in Germany are also flooded, with warnings in place for rivers in the state of Saxony.