Death Toll Rises to 18 in Central Europe Floods

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.
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.”
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.
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.”