WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Soldiers dropped sandbags from military helicopters to reinforce river embankments and evacuated residents as the worst flooding in years spread Tuesday to a broad swath of Central Europe, taking lives and destroying homes.
Heavy flooding has affected a large part of the region in recent days, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria. There have been at least 17 deaths reported in the flooding, which follow heavy rainfall across the region.
Other places are now bracing for the flood waves, including two Central European gems: Budapest, the Hungarian capital on the Danube River, and Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland on the Oder River, its old town filled with architectural treasures.
Hungary’s government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán deployed soldiers to reinforce barriers along the Danube, and thousands of volunteers assisted in filling sandbags in dozens of riverside settlements.
In Budapest, authorities closed the city’s lower quays, which are expected to be breached by rising waters later Tuesday. The lower half of the city’s iconic Margaret Island was also closed.
In Wroclaw, firefighters and soldiers spent the night using sandbags to reinforce river embankments. The city zoo, located along the Oder, appealed for volunteers to fill sandbags on Tuesday morning.
“We and our animals will be extremely grateful for your help,” the zoo said in its appeal.
The city said it expected the flood wave to peak there around Friday, though some had predicted that would happen sooner. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk met with a crisis team early Tuesday and said there are contradictory forecasts from meteorologists.
Tusk’s government has declared a state of natural disaster across southern Poland.
To the south of Wroclaw, residents spent the night fighting to save Nysa, a town of 44,000 people, after the Nysa Klodzka River broke its banks the day before. Mayor Kordian Kolbiarz said 2,000 “women, men, children, the elderly” came out to try to save their town from the rising waters, forming a human chain that passed sandbags to the river bank.
“We simply … did everything we could,” Kolbiarz wrote on Facebook. “This chain of people fighting for our Nysa was incredible. Thank you. We fought for Nysa. Our home. Our families. Our future.”
Later on Tuesday, authorities in Nysa said the city center had been saved from the flooding.
In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the deputy mayor for the environment, Jakub Mrva, said the level of the Danube had peaked and would slowly decrease. He said that mobile barriers had saved the historic center, but that there was still damage, including to tram lines.
“We also observed major damage at the zoo, which is flooded, and there is relatively high damage in the city forests of Bratislava, where many trees have perished,” Mrva told The Associated Press in an interview, speaking next to the flooded banks of the Danube in Bratislava.
In the Czech Republic, waters have been receding in the two hardest-hit northeast regions. The government approved the deployment of 2,000 troops to help with clean-up efforts. The damage is expected to reach billions of euros.
The Czech government also scrambled to help local authorities organize regional elections on Friday and Saturday as several schools and other buildings serving as polling stations have been badly damaged. However, a planned evacuation of some 1,000 in the town of Veseli nad Luznici could be postponed as the waters had not reached critical levels so far.
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Associated Press writers Justin Spike in Budapest, Hungary, Karel Janicek in Prague, and photographer Tomas Hrivnak in Bratislava, Slovakia contributed to this report.
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