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The Guardian
Soldiers and energy workers have stacked thousands of sandbags to protect Serbia's biggest power plant from flood waters, which are expected to keep rising after the heaviest rains in the Balkans in more than a century killed dozens of people.On Monday, Bosnian state radio reported that the swollen Sava river, which has wreaked havoc in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, had again overwhelmed flood defences late on Sunday and flooded parts of the northern town of Orasje.
Waters receded in other parts of Bosnia, leaving behind mud, debris and dead animals. Another 1,000 people were evacuated from the border town of Bijeljina, threatened by flood waters from the Sava and the Drina, as well as 5,000 people from the northern town of Odzak, reports said.
In Serbia, a wall of sandbags several miles long was built around the Nikola Tesla power plant in the flood-hit town of Obrenovac, 20 miles south-west of the capital, Belgrade. It covers roughly half of Serbia's electricity needs.
DW
Hasa Huseinovic is still reeling from the fright she got. "We noticed how the floor was moving," says the 53-year-old. Then a neighboring house sank down into the ground. "The concrete began to rise, the asphalt cracked, and water came out of the floor."Huseinovic then watched as eight houses in her village, Svrake, near the Bosnian-Herzegovinian capital Sarajevo, were carried away by the flood and a mudslide.
She was scared. "We didn't want to leave the house," she says. But her son started shouting at them, telling them they would die unless they got away. "This prompted us to run out of the house. I had only gone 10 meters when I heard a crash." At that moment, the houses around her collapsed and she fell to the floor. "I somehow managed to get out of there," she adds.
Al Jazeera
Floodwaters have triggered more than 3,000 landslides across the Balkans, laying waste to entire towns and villages and disturbing land mines leftover from the region's 1990s war, along with warning signs that marked the unexploded weapons.The Balkans' worst flooding since record keeping began has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and threatened to inundate Serbia's main power plant, which supplies electricity to a third of the country and most of the capital, Belgrade.
Authorities on Sunday organised a frenzied helicopter airlift to get terrified families to safety before the water swallowed up their homes, Associated Press news agency reported.
Floodwaters receded on Sunday in some locations, laying bare the full scale of the damage.
NPR
The worst flooding on record in the Balkans has killed dozens of people and now threatens a power plant that is Serbia's main source of electricity.Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes from rising waters in Serbia, Bosnia and parts of Croatia. Thousands more remain stranded, many of them trapped in upper floors of buildings without power or phone service. More than a thousand people have been evacuated by helicopter.
The flooding was triggered by months worth of rain that has fallen during the past five days.
"Flood maps marking the affected areas make it look as though a vast inland sea has suddenly appeared across the region," The Economist reports.
Surging water from the Sava River was threatening the Nikola Tesla power plant in the Serbian town of Obrenovac, 30 kilometers southwest of Belgrade. The Associated Press reports that the coal-fired plant "supplies electricity for half of Serbia and most of Belgrade."
About a quarter of Bosnia-Hercegovina's four million people are without clean water after the worst flooding since modern records began, the foreign minister has said.Zlatko Lagumdzija said the destruction was "terrifying" and compared it to Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
At least 35 people have died in Serbia and Bosnia in flooding caused by unprecedented torrential rain.
More victims are expected to be found as the waters recede.
"The consequences of the floods are terrifying," Mr Lagumdzija told a news conference.
"The physical destruction is not less than the destruction caused by the war."
He said more than 100,000 houses and other buildings were no longer usable and the road infrastructure was badly damaged.
He also said there had been about 2,000 landslides, some of which were on minefields left over from the war. Nearly 120,000 unexploded landmines remain in more than 9,400 carefully marked minefields.