Local people gathered on bridges and the embankment in the city centre to watch the eponymous Opava river gradually rise level with the banks, fed by heavy rain that started on Friday and only stopped on Sunday morning.
Police vans and fire trucks blocked roads to the local Katerinky housing estate, from which thousands of people had been ordered to evacuate on Saturday.
Standing outside a prefab block of flats with a friend, purchase manager Marie Lasak Blokesova assessed the situation, reflecting on the devastating floods that hit the region in 1997.
Back then, floodwater killed 50 people and caused damage worth $3 billion -- especially in the eastern parts of the Czech Republic, an EU country of 10.9 million people.
"Since we all expected this, I hope everyone is as ready as we are, and since we had already experienced the 1997 flood, we are basically just waiting," Lasak Blokesova told AFP.
"We had enough information suggesting what will come. These days with Facebook and Instagram, you know what is happening around you and so you can calm down a bit in that you know what's going on."
The water kept rising as she watched -- a car park where cars were safe at 9:30 (0730 GMT) was covered with water reaching above the sills an hour later.
"My boyfriend has recalled the 1997 flood so we have made stocks of drinking water and prepared a camping gas cooker in case they switched off gas and electricity," said Lasak Blokesova.
"We also recharged all the electrical devices we have and we are hoping we just won't need this all."
- Evacuate or not? -
Since Friday, over 10,000 people have been evacuated across the Czech Republic.
More than 250,000 households were without electricity on Sunday, four people were reported missing and firefighters had attended almost 15,000 incidents.
In Opava, several people braved the high water in the street on foot, many in Wellington boots.
Some even rode bicycles through the floodwater, while one maverick driver rode his Volkswagen into the waves before changing his mind and returning in a U-turn.
Some in the upper stories watched out of their windows -- deaf to the firefighters' pleas to evacuate.
Dustbins and containers floated freely along the Opava, navigating between flooded bus stops and road signs.
- 'Watching this in horror' -
The river in Opava, a city some 240 kilometres (150 miles) east of the Czech capital Prague, was expected to culminate at around 1700 GMT on Sunday, forecasters said.
Twenty kilometres upstream, the city of Krnov was 80-percent flooded by 1230 GMT, said its deputy mayor Miroslav Binar.
In Velke Hostice -- a village about five kilometres down the stream from Opava -- local volunteers were frantically trying to perfect an improvised wall of sandbags stretching for 500 metres (550 yards) on a jetty built after the 1997 floods for protection.
Visibly tired, local hunter Jaroslav Lexa told AFP the men had worked on the sandbag barrier until 1:00 am on Saturday night, and resumed work at 7:00 am on Sunday, patching holes in the impressive work.
"I'm watching this in horror. If we don't stop the wave, it will flood the lower part of the village," he said.
Death toll rises as storm lashes central, eastern Europe
Glucholazy (AFP) Sept 15, 2024 -
One person has drowned in Poland and an Austrian fireman has died responding to floods, authorities said Sunday, as Storm Boris lashed central and eastern Europe with torrential rains.
Since Thursday, swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia have been hit by high winds and unusually heavy rainfall.
The rains have flooded streets and submerged entire neighbourhoods in some places, while shutting down public transport and electricity in others.
Romanians waded through armpit-high water to safety, Poles sought shelter in schools and Czechs hurriedly put up sand dykes in an effort to keep the water at bay.
Sunday's deaths bring the overall toll from the storm to eight, with thousands evacuated across the continent.
In Romania, two bodies were found on Sunday, after four people were reported killed earlier, and one person was declared missing.
Four people were reported missing in the Czech Republic.
"The water came into the house, it destroyed the walls, everything," Sofia Basalic, 60, a resident of Romania's village of Pechea, in the hard-hit region of Galati, told AFP.
"It took the chickens, the rabbits, everything. It took the oven, the washing machine, the refrigerator. I have nothing left," she said.
- 'Worst hours of their lives' -
"Heartfelt solidarity with all affected by the devastating floods in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia", EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X, formerly Twitter, adding that the EU was ready to offer support.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday morning that "we have the first confirmed death by drowning, in the Klodzko region" on the Polish-Czech border in the southwest of the country, which has been hit hardest by the floods.
Around 1,600 people have been evacuated in Klodzko and Polish authorities have called in the army to support firefighters.
Separately, a fireman in northeastern Austria died in floods in the Lower Austria region, which has been classified as a natural disaster zone, regional governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters Sunday.
"For many residents, the upcoming hours will be the worst of their lives," she said.
Emergency services had made nearly 5,000 interventions overnight in the state of Lower Austria, where flooding had trapped many residents in their homes.
A highway from western Austria to Vienna was shut just outside the capital and four of Vienna's five metro lines had been shut in the city, where the Wien river was threatening to overflow its banks, according to local news reports.
In Poland, authorities shut the Golkowice border crossing with the Czech Republic after a river flooded its banks on Saturday, as well as closing several roads and halting trains on the line linking the towns of Prudnik and Nysa.
Tusk said that Ukraine, which is fending off a Russian invasion in its third year, has offered to send some 100 rescuers specially equipped to deal with floods to help as an expression of solidarity with Poland, which has steadfastly backed Kyiv during the war.
"It's very touching", Tusk said of the offer.
In the Czech Republic, a dam in the south of the country burst its banks, flooding towns and villages downstream.
In the village of Velke Hostice, residents put up a wall of sandbags 500 metres long in an effort to hold back the rising waters of the River Opava.
"If we don't stop the wave, it will flood the lower part of the village," local hunter Jaroslav Lexa told AFP.
- 'Catastrophe of epic proportions' -
In southeastern Romania, another body was found on Sunday in the worst-affected Galati region, where four people had died on Saturday.
"We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences," Romania's President Klaus Iohannis said.
Hundreds of people have been rescued across 19 parts of the country, emergency services said, releasing a video of flooded homes in a village by the Danube river.
"This is a catastrophe of epic proportions," said Emil Dragomir, mayor of Slobozia Conachi, a village in Galati, where he said 700 homes had been flooded.
Romania's interior minister said more than 6,000 households and 15,000 people were affected in the region.
- Snow in September -
In Austria, some areas of the Tyrol region were blanketed by up to a metre (three feet) of snow -- an exceptional situation for mid-September, which saw temperatures of up to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) last week.
Rail services were suspended in the country's east early Sunday.
In neighbouring Slovakia, a state of emergency has been declared in the capital Bratislava.
Heavy rains are expected to continue until at least Monday in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Related Links
Bringing Order To A World Of Disasters
When the Earth Quakes
A world of storm and tempest
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
