Heavy rainfalls and flooding in Romania
Romania has been plighted with heavy rainfalls and flooding for the second weekend in a row. Instead of enjoying a sunny May Day mini-holiday, many Romanians had to fight off a new round of heavy downpours and flooding.
Roxana Vasile, 05.05.2014, 12:31
The Romanians in the southwest of the country faced a copycat Easter day weather that they had seen two weeks before.Heavy downpours on Saturday and Sunday night made a lot of rivers burst their banks, chiefly in the counties of Mehedinti, Gorj and Caras-Severin, which bore the brunt of the latest flooding with over 100 households flooded and people completely taken aback by the coming waters.
Some towns and villages have been left without electricity and hundreds of hectares of farmland are still covered by water. County roads have been submerged and railway traffic has been disrupted.
Squads of firefighters, policemen and gendarmes have been summoned to the site, in an attempt to control the situation. Rescue operations were the top priority, although in some cases that involved the evacuation of people from the affected areas.
The capital city wasn’t spared, either. A couple of hours of heavy rain and thunderstorms on Sunday were enough to raise water level on some streets in Bucharest at one meter.
Hail was also reported in some regions of Bucharest, with posts on various social networks showing a three-centimeter layer of ice, similar to that of snow.
Traffic was disrupted on several main roads, with many cars and trams stuck in traffic jams. Some vehicles have been damaged by branches falling from broken or uprooted trees. Traffic was restricted and special teams fitted with high-capacity water pumps were sent to the affected boulevards. The water level on the Dambovita river, which crosses Bucharest, has been diminished in order to control the flooding.
According to the latest forecasts, bad weather will continue into the week until Wednesday and authorities are on the lookout for landslides and swollen rivers.
