Poland braced for more floods
Thousands of workers scrambled to reinforce dykes with sandbags and evacuate villages ahead of a 65-mile-long flood wave coursing down Poland’s largest river today after a week of torrential rains.
The surge moving north in the Vistula River threatened dozens of villages in central Poland after a week of storms and floods that killed at least 25 people and caused tens of millions of pounds in damage in the south.
The flood wave was expected to crest in Warsaw, the capital, tonight. Emergency crews were on alert, but city officials said they were confident river dykes would hold.
Rural residents of the Vistula’s flood plain to the south were less fortunate.
An army engineering battalion used boats and amphibious vehicles to ferry food and water to the village of Trzesn, about 125 miles south of Warsaw, where the ground floor of nearly every house was flooded.
Most of the villagers were evacuated ahead of the water, but some just retreated to upper floors to wait it out.
‘‘We are trying to persuade them to leave, but they decided to stay and take care of their homes,’’ said Captain Leszek Stepien, whose special unit was formed after severe flooding four years ago.
The floods are the worst since the summer of 1997, when storms and rampaging rivers swamped 46,000 homes and killed 55 people.
Floodwaters have been surging since last week along the Vistula, an economically important waterway that flows through Poland’s major cities, farmlands and industrial zones on its 650 mile course from the mountains of southern Poland to the Baltic Sea.
