Flooding threatens Balkan cities

Floods threatened cities and fertile lands across Serbia, and record water levels in one of Europe’s longest rivers surged downstream toward neighbouring Romania and Bulgaria on today.

In Serbia, emergency crews and volunteers struggled to keep embankments and sand barriers from giving way as the Danube River’s water levels started receding.

Meanwhile, the Tisa River, which flows from Hungary in the north, started rising dramatically.

Spring melting of snow together with heavy rains has led to floods throughout south-eastern Europe in the past few weeks.

More than 3,000 residents left on their own or were evacuated by the police from the southern Romanian villages of Rast and Negoi after a dike collapsed yesterday, flooding the communities.

In the southern village of Roseti, workers dynamited a dam to divert river water on about 10,000 hectares of farm land to help protect the Romanian port city of Calarasi.

Elsewhere along the river, some 40,000 hectares of land were flooded by the Danube, causing extensive damage to agriculture. In Serbia’s northern Vojvodina province – the flooding and heavy rains submerged some 10,000 hectares of farmland and turned another 200,000 hectares into mud and slush.