ROMANIA: Romanian officials warned thousands of people yesterday they would be forcibly moved from their flood-threatened homes if they refused to abandon them to the raging Danube.
More than 7,000 Romanians, and many hundreds of Serbs and Bulgarians, have already fled houses near the river as snowmelt and spring rains caused it to rise to its highest level in a century.
"We are now having trouble convincing more than 2,000 villagers to leave their homes," said Dumitru Baragan, deputy mayor of the Romanian town of Bistret. "If they continue to object, we will have to evacuate them forcibly."
Hundreds of emergency workers have tried for two days to fix a breach in a local dyke, but the power of the floodwater, exacerbated by high winds and heavy rain, has thwarted their efforts.
"Some 200 houses from a low-lying area in Bistret could be flooded if water breaks the dykes," said the town's mayor, Constantin Raicea, adding that emergency crews planned to drop bundled reeds from a military helicopter to reinforce the flood defences.
Nicolae Giugea, an official from badly hit Dolj county, added: "We couldn't do anything to strengthen the dams last night, because of the wind and heavy rains - let's hope we can do something today."
In the village of Bechetul de Vale, authorities also began mass evacuations. "We are trying to hold the waters with sandbags, but I don't know how long we can control the situation," said the local mayor, Constantin Oclei.
"If the people don't want to be evacuated, we will force them." Prime minister Calin Tariceanu drove home that message before chairing an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday.
"Given the situation, I'm afraid we will have to force people to leave their homes," he said. "They must understand that they could die."
Record levels on the Danube upstream in Slovakia and Hungary made Balkan states brace themselves for the flood and, though the damage to farmland, property and infrastructure has been immense, casualties have been few.
In Bulgaria the town of Vidin, home to 50,000 people, is in danger of inundation unless straining flood defences can be reinforced, and all but one of the country's Danube ports are closed.
Serbia faces another flood wave in the coming days, after parts of the capital Belgrade and other large towns were swamped earlier this week.
The Tisza, a major river that merges with the Danube in Serbia, is flowing at a record height of over 10m (33ft) in southern Hungary, where some 23,000 emergency workers are trying to contain it.
As teams of Serb soldiers, police and volunteers reinforced makeshift defences along the Tisza and Danube, a stream burst its banks and flooded residential areas near the town of Kragujevac, about 100km (60mls) from Belgrade, after heavy rain.
About 225,000 hectares - or some 5 per cent of all Serbian farmland - is believed to have been swamped by the flood, causing damage estimated at €35 million.