Emergency workers used heavy machinery in a race against time Monday to build up defences against flooded rivers threatening large swathes of southeastern Europe. Thousands of villagers were forced to flee as floodwaters from the overflowing Danube river spread across southern Romania and completely submerged their homes, officials said. In parts of the Balkans, the Danube recently reached its highest level in more than 100 years. The dangerous tide of water has been moving eastwards beyond Belgrade towards Bulgaria and Romania, where authorities deliberately flooded fields in a bid to spare towns after a similar situation there last year claimed dozens of lives. Some 3,000 residents of the Romanian village of Rast were evacuated before the surging Danube entirely submerged their homes. Some 115 houses were completely destroyed and another 600 were damaged, local officials said. Dolj district chief Nicolae Giugea said 10,000 residents of four villages in the area were on standby for evacuation if the water continued to rise.
In Serbia, civil teams backed by the police force and army were reinforcing about 250 kilometres (155 miles) of dykes lined with white sandbags on the bulging banks of several rivers. Using heavy earth-moving equipment, tractors and industrial trucks, the crews shored up the defences of Veliko Gradiste and Golubac, two Serbian towns on the border with Romania that are expected to bear the brunt of the flooded Danube within hours. The situation was made worse by swelling Danube tributaries, including the Tisa and Begej rivers, which meet at the town of Titel north of the Serbian capital.