ROMANIA: Thousands of Romanians fled their homes yesterday when the raging Danube broke through flood defences, and emergency crews strove to reinforce straining flood barriers across the Balkans.
Some 3,000 people were evacuated as the Danube overwhelmed the village of Rast in southern Romania, where the river marks the country's border with Bulgaria.
Local official Nicolae Giugea said it had destroyed 115 houses and damaged a further 600, while 10,000 residents of four nearby villages were on standby for evacuation if the floodwaters continued to rise. After breaking records upriver in Hungary and Slovakia in recent weeks, the Danube has now surged to its highest level for more than a century in parts of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.
Hundreds of people fled their homes in the Balkans over the weekend as the river rose, flooding parts of central Belgrade in Serbia and several smaller towns and villages.
"The situation is under control along the whole flow of the Danube through Serbia," the head of its flood prevention task force, Goran Kamcev, said.
"We now have to watch out for the long-standing pressure on the barriers, with water expected to stay high for some 10 to 15 days."
Romania has intentionally flooded more than 90,000 hectares of farmland along the river to ease the pressure on other, more densely populated stretches.
In Bulgaria yesterday, the Danube ports of Lom, Oryahovo, Somovit and Nikopol were submerged, along with thousands of hectares of farmland.