Floods devastate eastern Europe as rivers, dams overflow banks

August 8, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland

Flooding caused by heavy rains has killed at least eight people in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, officials said Saturday.

Lenka Moravcova, a spokeswoman for a rescue service in the northern Czech Republic, said three men drowned in a region on the border with Poland and Germany on Saturday. A fourth victim was found drowned late Saturday. Details were not given.

At least a thousand people had to be evacuated, some from areas below two dams threatened by rising waters. People in the towns of Chrastava and Frydlant were rescued by police and military helicopters from the roofs of their homes.

Three summer camps for children were evacuated.

Meteorologists warned the rains were not expected to stop until today.

Police said floods killed three people in the eastern German state of Saxony.

Authorities in the city of Chemnitz told German news agency DAPD that three bodies were found Saturday in the basement of a flooded building in the town of Neukirchen in Saxony.

Police said a 72-year-old woman, her 74-year-old husband and a 63-year-old man apparently drowned while trying to carry furniture upstairs from the basement. All three lived in the building.

Heavy rains in Poland caused flooding in most of a town of 18,000 people and killed one person.

The floods struck late Friday but worsened Saturday, leaving three-fourths of the southwestern town of Bogatynia inundated after the Miedzianka River overflowed its banks.

Television news programs broadcast images of men knee-high in water flowing through the town’s streets. In some places the water was even higher, almost burying some cars.

Firefighters used boats to evacuate people trapped in homes. Emergency workers from neighboring Germany also mobilized to help the town. A spokeswoman for local authorities, Dagmara Turek-Samol, told the news agency PAP that one person was killed in the floods.

In Pakistan, officials estimate as many as 13 million people throughout the South Asian nation have been affected by the worst flooding in the country’s 63-year history, though the United Nations, apparently using different metrics, has put the number at roughly 4 million. About 1,500 people have died, most of them in the northwest, the hardest-hit region.

Chinese state media in Beijing said today that at least 65 people have been killed in landslides that hit Gansu province in the northwest of the country. Many parts of China have been hit by the country’s worst flooding in a decade that has killed more than 1,100 people, with more than 600 still missing this year.