The Central European deluge that has killed more than 100 people and left tens of thousands homeless and destitute over the past three weeks is taking a huge economic, environmental, and perhaps political toll on Poland, the Czech republic, and Germany. The German cabinet has already made almost £12 million available for flood victims and 10 times that amount in cheap credits, while the Polish government has unveiled plans to borrow a billion dollars to spend on relief.
But such figures look certain to be but a fraction of the real cost as the flooding abates and leaves behind huge tracts of muddy, ruined landscape over the coming weeks.
The torrential rains that started falling on the northern Carpathians in the Czech Republic on July 5th are the source of the disaster which has left a third of that country under water and flooded 1.5 million acres in south-west Poland, according to the Interior Minister, Mr Leszek Miller, yesterday, and triggered Germany's biggest peacetime military operation.
Surging north up the River Oder to the Baltic Sea, the waters are doing colossal environmental damage.
The world's biggest reinsurance company in Munich has made initial estimates of well over one billion marks damage, while Germany's insurance giant, Allianz, is talking of deutschmark 100 million worth of damage to insured property alone in eastern Germany.
These figures also look to be a mere fraction of the real cost. By comparison, flooding in northern Italy in 1995 left 10,000 people homeless and inflicted $12.5 billion worth of damage.
The damage in Germany is to the pastoral west bank of the Oder, a fertile farming area historically known as Berlin's "vegetable allotment" and it is the local farmers with their 24,000 cattle, 10,000 pigs, 3,000 sheep, and 400,000 heads of poultry who have most to lose. The cost to the farmers alone could run into billions.
In south-west Poland, by contrast, the waters have devastated local industry, and have swept chemicals, oil depots, fertilisers, and sewage into the earth and along the Oder up to the Baltic.
Germany's Environment and Nature Conservancy Federation warned yesterday of a "poison cocktail" being formed in the Oder region and said numerous fuel depots had not been emptied to offset the risk of oil slicks.
The German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, was quick to visit the stricken region last week to assure local easterners that their state was not "far away from the Rhine" in the west. Dr Kohl hoped to deflect any potential political fall-out from the catastrophe and may have succeeded. The Czech authorities, too, by responding promptly and calling local states of emergency, are seen to have acted competently.
But Poland has suffered the worst, the response of the government has been widely criticised, the Prime Minister, Mr Wlodziemerz Cimoszewicz, has had to apologise for inept remarks made at the start of the crisis, and local communities are enraged with the authorities.
Last week in a village near Wroclaw, locals erected barricades of flaming tyres against police units heavy-handedly seeking to clear the area using truncheons.
Individuals and communities are seeking to sue local and central authorities for damages because of incompetence. At the beginning of the flooding, Mr Cimoszewicz said it was up to farmers to make certain they were insured and that the government would not be compensating them. He has since had to eat his words.
An opinion poll last week, however, put the governing left-wing coalition in Poland at 26 per cent against 22 for its main rival, Solidarity. Elections are due on September 21.
But politicians of all stripes are unlikely to be well-received in the devastated south-west and it is not clear how an election campaign is supposed to take place amid such chaos. The government and the president, however, refuse to postpone the elections or call a state of emergency which would require a delay in the election.
The Irish Red Cross Society has appealed for help for flood victims in central and eastern Europe. In a statement, it said that over 100 people had died and more than one million people had been affected by the freak weather conditions which had caused £3 billion worth of damage.