Romania on Flood Alert

Because of rising temperatures and a lot of precipitation, some rivers in the south, centre and north-eastern Romania, as well as the Romanian section of the Danube, have seen their levels grow significantly, causing flooding

România Internațional, 29.03.2018, 13:45

Because of the
large amount of precipitation seen in recent days and of rising temperatures,
hydrologists have issued orange and yellow flood alerts for almost the entire
Romanian section of the Danube, valid until the 6th of April. Also,
an orange code alert was in place on a number of smaller rivers in the south,
in the counties of Olt, Teleorman, Arges, Dambovita and Giurgiu, and a yellow
code alert has been issued until Friday afternoon for rivers in the south,
centre and north-east of the country.

The Romanian Waters National
Administration says it plans to drain the areas where water is more likely to
accumulate, in order to prevent high flooding. The county of Teleorman has been
the most seriously affected by the increase in water levels, with 27 villages,
several thousand hectares of farm and pasture land and a number of village
roads being flooded. An orange code alert is also in place until next week on
the river Danube, on the Calafat-Oltenita and Cernavoda-Galati sectors and in
the Danube Delta. Authorities are on alert and keeping a close eye on the state
of the dams, worried about the high level of the Danube.

In Giurgiu, the Danube
has risen above the warning level of 640 cm, and about 400 km of floodplain
forest are covered by waters. The river has also risen above the 610-cm warning
level in Braila. The local authorities have already taken measures to raise the
level of the drainage system in the port area by installing concrete tubes and
thus avoid what happened in 2010, when the river reached 713 cm and flooded the
entire waterfront. The Danube is also rising in Galati. The last time the river
exceeded the warning level was in 2014, when all the restaurants on its bank
were flooded. It was necessary at the time to install a barrier of sandbags to
prevent the flooding of the shipyard.

The Danube has also spilled into the
waterfront in Tulcea. To prevent problems, the local authorities have activated
16 water-pumping stations in the north and north-east of the county and have
imposed weight restrictions for ships. Also, authorities have decided that all
ships transiting the Romanian section of the Danube must sail at low speed so
as not to cause waves. The measures aims to protect the flood dams and will be
lifted as soon as hydro-meteorological conditions improve. In other news,
several villages in the south were affected by landslides caused by
precipitation and some people have been
evacuated.