Volunteers and emergency workers have raced to secure river banks in the historic Polish city of Wroclaw as residents elsewhere in Central Europe have tallied the cost of floods caused by Storm Boris, which have wreaked havoc and killed at least 21 people.
The deluge has left a trail of destruction from Romania to Poland. While waters were receding in many areas, others were nervously waiting on Tuesday for rivers to burst their banks.
Areas on the Czech-Polish border were among the worst hit since the weekend as gushing, debris-filled rivers devastated historic towns, collapsed bridges and destroyed houses.
Flooding has killed seven people in Romania, where waters have receded since the weekend. Six were killed in Poland, five in Austria and three in the Czech Republic. Tens of thousands of Czech and Polish households remained without power or freshwater.
In Wroclaw, Poland’s third largest city, people worked to secure river banks in preparation for the Oder and Bystrzyca rivers cresting.
In a northern suburb, 44-year-old IT programmer Michal Nakiewicz was one of dozens of volunteers helping emergency services pile up sandbags on the bank of the Bystrzyca.
“I saw that both parents and children were helping to pour sand. I even saw 5-, 6-year-olds, so quite a gathering,” he told the Reuters news agency. “I think that there may not be enough hands in the services, so every pair of hands helps.”
The city’s zoo called for volunteers to help pack sandbags to protect animal enclosures, and employees and volunteers began to move some of the 450,000 books from the city’s main church archive to higher floors of the Archdiocesan Archives building.
In Lewin Brzeski, about 60km (37 miles) south of Wroclaw, floodwaters had already arrived and continued to rise.
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