Hungarian villagers have begun to return to their homes after unprecedented floods last week, but they face health risks including the danger of infection, officials said Monday.
The record floods, which hit eastern Hungary as well as neighbouring Ukraine and Romania, destroyed 180 homes and damaged another 500 in Hungary, said emergency services spokesman Tibor Dobson.
About 1,000 villagers forced to flee from the northern Tivadar region could return to their homes over the weekend as the flooding was slowly travelling downstream, he said.
But before moving back the people, sanitation teams had to clean up the villages to remove, among others, hundreds of drowned sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and thousands of poultry, he said.
Rescue officials called on local mayors not to restart public sewage and water supply systems pending authorisation to prevent epidemics, as they were handing out bottled or bagged drinking water for people and animals in the mainly agricultural region.
So far, 3,500 people had been vaccinated against hepatitis, sanitation officials said.
Hungary's government lifted late Saturday a state of emergency declared in the region last week, but water management officials warned that the saturated dykes posed further threat to villages that so far escaped submersion.
Several villages are "only protected by fully saturated sandbag dykes that will need further reinforcement," said Laszlo Fazekas of the northern Tisza region water management authority.
Helicopters were delivering sand and some 10,000 people were stregthening dykes Monday in the country's hardest-hit northern region, where several roads have been cut to channel the water to farmlands, said rescue operations spokesman Laszlo Helmeczy.
Hungary has spent about one billion forints on flood protection since last week, said Sandor Tombor of the transport and water management ministry – BUDAPEST (AFP)
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