Star Metro - Death toll rises as storm lashes central, eastern Europe

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 seven, with thousands evacuated across the continent.

In Romania, a body was found on Sunday, after four people were reported killed earlier. Four more 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' -

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.

"Unfortunately a firefighter has died while responding to the flooding," Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the governor of Lower Austria, 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.

Polish 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.

In the Czech Republic, police reported four people were missing Sunday.

Three were in a car that was swept into a river in the northeastern town of Lipova-Lazne, and another man was missing after being swept away by floods in the southeast.

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' -

On Saturday, four people died in floods in southeastern Romania, with the bodies found in the worst-affected region, Galati in the southeast, where 5,000 homes were damaged.

Another body was found in the same region on Sunday.

"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 5,000 households and 15,000 people were affected in the region.

Some areas of Austria's 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.

Firefighters have intervened around 150 times in Vienna since Friday to clear roads blocked by storm debris and pump water from cellars, local media reported.

Neighbouring Slovakia has declared a state of emergency in the capital, Bratislava.

Heavy rains are expected to continue until at least Monday in the Czech Republic and Poland.

O.Poirier--SMC