Bad Weather Affects Southern Romania

Romanians in the southern regions of the country have these days been under code orange and yellow warnings for torrential rain, storm and flooding.

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România Internațional, 29.07.2014, 13:24

In the past days, yellow and orange code alerts have been issued for the regions in the south and south-west of Romania, which have been faced with heavy downpours and storms followed by flooding. Authorities in the regions with a high risk of flooding have been put on a high state of alert, ready to intervene in emergency situations. The most affected are the counties of Mehedinti, Valcea, Gorj, Dolj, Olt and Arges, where heavy rainfalls have amounted up to 80 liters per square meter, which led to several rivers bursting their banks.

Hundreds of households and hectares of farmland have been swept away by waters, which have also disrupted traffic on county roads. Strong winds have torn down electricity poles and power lines causing outages. Fire fighters, intervention teams and gendarmes have been deployed to the flood-stricken regions, where pumps have been used to evacuate water from households. Saving human lives has been the top priority. In Bucharest, deputy Prime Minister Liviu Dragnea has summoned the Command Center for Emergency Situations on a daily basis, an institution, which remains on high alert ready to respond to any appeal from the authorities. Here is Deputy Prime Minister Liviu Dragnea.

“With maximum attention all the local committees for emergency situations, including the mayors in the regions affected must get ready and be on high alert. All the Interior Ministry structures are out in the field and they are allowed to dispatch more personnel if need be. If you need assistance in other counties please let us know.”

State secretary with the Ministry of Administration and the Interior, Raed Arafat had earlier announced that intervention teams with the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations in the affected regions had been deployed. According to him, 11 hundred people backed by equipment and machinery have been mobilized for relief operations. More personnel from police, gendarmes and army units is ready to join the operations.

Unfortunately the latest weather reports show that the atmospheric instability will migrate from south and will soon engulf central Romania, whose regions are in for heavy downpours, thunderstorms and gales.