Record floods hit Balkans

Emergency crews and volunteers struggled to keep embankments and sand barriers from giving way yesterday amid record flooding along the Danube and its tributaries in northern Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans.

In Romania, the government ordered controlled flooding of thousands of hectares (acres) of farmland to stave off threats to communities along the Danube. Hundreds of residents were evacuated in southern Romania after a dam collapsed and the river threatened over 130 houses in the village of Rast.

In north-western Bulgaria, the Danube flooded most of the industrial zone in the city of Vidin, with water levels soaring to 966cm this weekend.

An emergency tent camp for 1,200 people was being set up just outside the city.

Some 40% of the nearby Bulgarian port city of Nikopol was under water, threatening to flood the pumping station and cut off fresh water supplies. Hundreds of people had left the city.

Although the water in Serbia was only rising slightly, in Belgrade – the republic’s capital located on the confluence of the Sava River and the Danube - lower-lying streets were submerged and closed to traffic. Parts of the city’s ancient fortress were also flooded.

Belgrade Mayor Nenad Bogdanovic pledged that some 100 of the capital’s buildings damaged by the floods would be repaired and that dozens of impoverished Gypsies, or Roma, evacuated to a nearby sports centre from their shantytown along the Sava would be taken care of.

“Keeping embankments stable is the priority now,” Bogdanovic told reporters after touring flooded areas on Saturday.

Swollen by the spring snow melt and heavy rains, the Danube – Europe’s second longest river – has reached record highs in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria in the past few days, flooding towns, villages and farmland.

Overnight, the level of the Danube near Veliko Gradiste, a town 90km east of Belgrade and close to the Romanian border, reached an all-time high of 965cm. A strong south-easterly wind was reported to have picked up, threatening sandbag barriers.

In nearby Golubac, alarm sirens on Saturday called hundreds of town residents to the banks to shore up threatened barriers. Pumps were struggling to drain water from the town’s submerged streets.

Serbia’s government had introduced emergency flood measures earlier in the week.

In the eastern town of Smederevo, authorities drafted all men employed in the municipal services to flood-fighting crews on the Danube. Dozens of Smederevo residents were evacuated to a refugee centre and 5,000 acres of fertile farmland surrounding the town were flooded.

Serbia’s Red Cross sent Smederevo 450 mattresses, blankets and pairs of boots.

Zvonko Kostic, a waterways official in Smederevo, stressed that few Serbian towns and cities, except for Belgrade, have the necessary heavy machinery required to fight floods around the clock.

“The volunteers are tired, it’s hard to keep up the tempo day after day,” Kostic said.

Villagers in Ritopek, 15 kilometres (nine miles) southeast of Belgrade, were angered over authorities’ lack of help. They said families struggled on their own in the half-submerged community.

“The state has practically forgotten us. All they did was bring a truckload of sand and dump it here,” resident Andra Miletic told AP Television News.

In the northern Vojvodina province – Serbia’s breadbasket because of its wheat and corn production – the flooding and heavy rains since Wednesday have swelled several Danube tributaries, completely submerging some 25,000 acres of farmland and turning 500,000 acres more into mud and slush that could threaten crops.

Authorities in Romania also evacuated some 600 people from several Danube communities. The river broke through several dikes in the southern counties. In the city of Fetesti, hundreds of civil protection workers, soldiers and volunteers worked to beef up a dike.