10,000 Romanians evacuated from Danube villages

ROMANIA: About 10,000 Romanians were being evacuated from villages along the Danube last night, as flood defences gave way after holding back record water levels for a week.

"The situation is very bad here," said Constantin Raicea, mayor of the village of Bistret. "Half of the dyke was broken last night and we could not repair it."

President Traian Basescu visited Bistret yesterday and urged officials to act quickly to evacuate thousands more people in the flood-ravaged region.

"The villagers from Bistret need to be evacuated immediately," he said. "We have to evacuate the area using force because some people do not want to leave their houses."

Romania has already evacuated thousands of people as melting snow and spring rain swelled the Danube to heights not seen for a century.

It has also intentionally flooded tens of thousands of hectares of farmland to reduce pressure around populated areas, but many barriers along the river are still in danger of collapse.

Elena Anghel of Romania's National Hydrology Institute said: "Water pressure is very high on these earth dykes and there are more in danger of collapse as the floods last a long time and the levels are decreasing very slowly."

The Danube forms much of Romania's border with Bulgaria, where all but one of the major river ports are under water and about 2,500 people have been moved to higher ground.

In neighbouring Serbia, about 3,000 homes have been flooded and some 225,000 hectares of fields submerged, an area equivalent to 5 per cent of the country's farmland.

To the north in Hungary, 6,000 people were working to patch more large cracks in flood defences at the confluence of the Tisza and Koros rivers. Water levels are receding very slowly across the Balkans and are expected to strain sodden flood defences for several days to come.

The Danube originates in Germany and flows through or forms borders with 10 countries before emptying into the Black Sea. In Bulgaria's Nikopol, several families evacuated over the weekend as water flooded their houses. In all, 61 people have fled the village.

"It's really difficult to make a prediction for the coming days," said Georgi Linkov, head of civil defence in Pleven, northern Bulgaria.