Polish police announced today that they had found two new victims of storm Boris, bringing the official death toll in the country to six and the total number of deaths in the central and eastern European countries affected to 21.
The police "have information about six people whose deaths may have been due to drowning", the Polish police headquarters indicated on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
The toll of victims of Storm Boris could still increase, with local Polish authorities mentioning other deaths, although they did not provide details and without confirmation from the police, "the only ones authorized" to announce this type of information, according to the Minister of the Interior, Tomasz Siemoniak.
"We ask everyone not to spread false information about the number of victims of the floods in the media", the police also wrote on the social network X.
According to the spokeswoman for the police in Klodzko, in south-west Poland, the two victims found today are an 82-year-old man, who was inside a wrecked vehicle, and another, near a local river.
"Everything suggests that their deaths were due to the floods", said the spokeswoman, Wioletta Martuszewska.
After passing through Italy last Thursday, storm Boris will return to the country between today and Thursday, meteorologists said.
Italy is already on high alert, especially in Emilia-Romagna and Marche, due to the floods that are expected, following the devastating ones that hit Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Austria, said one of the meteorologists, Lorenzo Tedici.
"The unusually warm Adriatic Sea will fuel storms across the Adriatic Apennines from today until Thursday," he said, adding that "more extreme weather events" are expected and that more than 250 cubic millimetres of rain will fall over the next three days.
A yellow warning for severe weather is in force in the Adriatic and Lazio regions from today.
In Austria, storm Boris forced the closure of the Danube River to navigation today due to high water levels - a measure that will only be lifted once safety is guaranteed.
Although the river level has begun to drop, the arrival of more water as a result of the melting of snow due to high temperatures could increase the flow of the Danube, which stretches for more than 8,000 kilometres between Germany and its mouth in the Black Sea, between Ukraine and Romania.
"At the moment, it is not possible to give a foreseeable date for lifting the closures [to navigation] along the Danube", explained the Austrian Ministry of Transport, regarding the measure.
Navigation, both for passenger and cargo vessels, has been suspended completely due to the danger involved in docking and unloading manoeuvres.
Around 70 passenger vessels and a similar number of cargo vessels were in the area closed to traffic, but most of the occupants had already disembarked before the water level rose.
Budapest is also facing traffic restrictions, and expects the Danube, which flows through the Hungarian capital, to rise sharply to levels not seen in the last ten years and which will probably overflow in the coming hours and days.
“The worst flooding in the last decade is approaching Budapest, which is why we have closed the jetties and Margaret Island [located in the Danube, in the city center] since Monday night,” said the mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony.
The authorities are installing movable dikes and temporary dams to deal with the flooding in areas close to the river.
Experts estimate that between next Friday and Saturday, the water level of the Danube will have risen to 851 centimeters in Budapest, around 40 centimeters below the all-time high recorded in 2013.
A maximum alert (level 3) has been declared for flood risk in several stretches of the Danube, as well as the Lajta River.
The Danube floods that have been reported in Austria over the past few days are expected to reach cities close to the Hungarian border today, such as Györ, where specialist teams and volunteers have been working through the night to build flood defenses.
In Györ, Szentendre and Nagymaros, dams have been installed on the banks of the Danube, while work on dykes and mobile dams continued on other stretches of the river today.
In the north-west of the Alpine republic, several roads have been closed to traffic.
According to Hungarian Defense Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, there are currently 1,400 soldiers working on the dykes, a number that could increase in the coming days "if necessary".
In view of the tense situation, Hungary's ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has postponed all his international engagements.
Possible flooding in Hungary will be a consequence of the arrival of huge amounts of water brought to Austria's rivers by Storm Boris over the past five days, as meteorological services predict that there will be no rain in the country for the next ten days.
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