Death Toll Rises to 18 in Central Europe Floods

A drone view shows a flooded area in Piszkowice, Poland, in this still image from a social media video taken on Sept. 15, 2024. Mariusz Kula/via Reuters

Flooding across central Europe has claimed the lives of at least 18 people, prompting some countries to declare a state of natural disaster and deploy troops.

Since Sept. 13, Storm Boris has caused rivers to swell across Central and Eastern Europe, including in Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

So far, seven people have died in Romania, four in Poland, four in Austria, and three in the Czech Republic. Tens of thousands of Czech and Polish households are still without power.

On Monday, Poland declared a state of disaster in the affected southern region and set aside 1 billion zlotys ($260 million) to help flood victims. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk met with a crisis team early Tuesday and said there are contradictory forecasts from meteorologists.

In a statement on social media platform X, translated from Polish, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, the country’s deputy prime minister and minister of national defense, said: “Neither the military, services, nor administration will leave these areas, and we will not abandon the places where the water has already receded.”

“This is the next priority, which will be implemented: supporting local governments in restoring order, in rebuilding, and in maintaining the capabilities of all components, including water purification, water treatment, and access to basic services,” he added.

44,000 Residents Evacuate

On Monday, Mayor Kordian Kolbiarz of the Polish town of Nysa asked people to head for higher ground and for all 44,000 residents to evacuate, citing the risk of an embankment breaching.

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.”

National fire chief Mariusz Feltynowski said on Tuesday in meetings with Tusk in the city of Wroclaw that the Nysa embankment was sealed, with military helicopters joining the operation to drop sandbags.

Czech Republic

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said more than 13,000 people had been evacuated.

Fiala said that he had called up 2,000 soldiers from the Czech army to help with the consequences of the disaster, and 5,500 of 6,500 units of professional and volunteer firefighters also being deployed.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán deployed soldiers to reinforce barriers along the Danube.

On Monday, he postponed all international obligations because of the “extreme weather conditions and the ongoing floods in Hungary.”

Factories

Factories have been forced to suspend operations.

In Ostrava, an industrial city of 290,000 people in the northeast Czech Republic, the BorsodChem chemical plant, which is partially owned by China’s Wanhua Chemical Group, shut down on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the company.

OKK Koksovny, one of the largest producers of foundry coke in Europe, stopped chemical production but was continuing to keep coking batteries at minimum levels, spokesman Jindrich Vanek said.

“There is water that has started rising and there must be a breach of the flood barriers,” he said. “We are without electricity and we are heating our batteries with coking gas, keeping them at technological minimum.”

Veolia Energie’s Trebovice electricity and heating plant site, which is nine miles from the border with Poland, cut hot water and heating supplies to large parts of Ostrava on Monday following flood damage, the company said in a statement.

“At the moment, the supply of heat and hot water in Ostrava is interrupted,” the company said. “The key technologies remained undamaged, and therefore if the situation develops favorably we estimate the restoration of supplies in a few days.”

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.