Floods Sweep Central Europe Causing Deaths; Region Evacuated by Thousands

At least eight people are believed to have died and thousands were evacuated after floods hit parts of central Europe, disrupting travel and power deliveries, following torrential rain across the region.

In the Czech Republic, the National Fire Brigade said three people perished and two are missing. The flooding has caused eight deaths in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic in total, Der Spiegel reported on its website today.

As much as 200 millimeters (7.9 inches) of rainfall fell in 24 hours since the night of Aug. 6, causing flash floods in the Czech Republic, according to the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. The authorities have declared a state of emergency in four of the country’s 14 regions.

The Czech government will have to find “tens of millions” of koruna immediately to help with supplying food and water and to clear roads, Prime Minister Petr Necas told TV channel CT24 by phone during a visit to flooded towns in the Liberec and Usti nad Labem regions in the north of the country, which were among the hardest hit by the flooding. The floods may have caused total damages of about 1 billion koruna ($53 million) in the country, he estimated.

“This was a critical amount of rainfall, which caused flash floods in areas that are not commonly hit by them,” the Institute’s spokesman Petr Dvorak said. “The weather is going to improve slowly and continually over the next two days and we don’t expect further heavy rainfalls across the country.”

Most water streams already reached maximum levels today, Dvorak said. The river Elbe, where the water level is currently at about 6 meters high, about three times its average, is likely to reach its maximum in a couple of hours, Dvorak said.

Drowned

In Germany, three people died yesterday in the town of Neukirchen after they drowned in a basement, the state of Saxony said in a statement on its website. The worst-hit region is around the city of Goerlitz near the Polish border, it said.

Railway services were disrupted during the day on several lines in the Czech Republic, including international railway lines to Dresden, CT24 reported. More than 4,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes in the Usti nad Labem and Liberec regions.

Some 1,000 households in the country were left without electricity supplies, according to CEZ AS, the country’s largest power producer, CT24 said. The Czech unit of RWE AG reported that 4,000 customers are without gas deliveries and 87 kilometers of gas pipelines are out of service, RWE’s spokesman Jiri Bezdek said by phone. Damages on RWE’s equipment will total tens of millions of koruna, Bezdek said.

Meteorologists predict that rains will ease in most areas of central and eastern Europe with only light showers today and tomorrow across the region.

---With assistance by Aaron Kirchfeld. Editors: Peter Branton, Anne Pollak

To contact the reporter on this story: Lenka Ponikelska in Prague lponikelska1@bloomberg.net.

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