Central Europe is slowly breathing a sigh of relief. In the Polish city of Wroclaw, the flood reached its provisional highest level on Thursday night. The Oder’s water level of 6.3 to 6.4 meters will remain at this level for a while, said Mayor Jacek Sutryk. The situation is tense, but the flood wave is significantly lower than during the Oder floods in 1997, when the water level reached 7.2 meters. A water level of just over three meters is normal.
Clean-up operations are now underway in the much more severely affected areas on the Polish-Czech border. The extent of the damage is still unclear. The EU Parliament is therefore pushing for more EU support for disaster relief.
In the afternoon, the heads of government of Poland (Donald Tusk), Austria (Karl Nehammer), the Czech Republic (Petr Fiala) and Slovakia (Robert Fico) met in Wroclaw to discuss protective measures and reconstruction. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also took part in the meeting.
The EU will provide ten billion euros from the Cohesion Fund to the countries affected by the storm disasters, von der Leyen said after the summit.
Austria could draw 500 million euros from this fund, said Chancellor Nehammer. With the one billion from the Austrian disaster fund, a total of 1.5 billion euros would now be available for aid.
Nehammer had already called for financial support and targeted aid programs. The aim must be to reduce bureaucracy in disaster relief in the EU in order to enable faster aid.
Host Tusk, who had invited the meeting, said he wanted to inform the Commission President “how many cities have been devastated by this water so that she has no doubt that this is an emergency.”
While clean-up operations have slowly begun in Central and Eastern Europe, persistent rainfall is now plaguing the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in particular.
Evacuations in Northern Italy
More than a thousand people in the area around the cities of Ravenna and Bologna were asked to leave their homes on Thursday. Two people are missing in the town of Bagnacavallo.
During the night into Thursday, train traffic in Emilia-Romagna was also partially suspended, as the Italian railway company Trenitalia announced. Seven high-speed and intercity trains were cancelled, while eleven other trains were subject to route restrictions, among other things.