Flooding continued to plague eastern Romania today, with officials bracing for more rising water over the weekend given adverse weather forecasts, dpa quoted local media as reporting. Twenty-two people have already drowned over the last nine days. The village of Saucesti, near the Danube tributary of Siret in eastern Romania, has been particularly affected. All the houses there are sitting in water reaching several metres in depth. Officials brought almost all of its 2,000 inhabitants to safety on Friday morning. Many of the evacuations had to be done by force, because people did not want to leave their houses for fear of looting, the Romanian broadcaster Realitatea TV reported. Angry residents gathered before the town hall and berated the mayor for not having built a protective dike as planned. An administrative official lamented that it was impossible to know what lay ahead, as there is no information about the situation at the headwaters of the Siret in the Ukraine. Emergency management officials said on Friday that in the previous 24 hours alone, 107 communities around the country had been flooded, while 8,000 people were evacuated. Almost 4,000 houses had been overtaken by the rising waters. An estimate on the total flooding damage was not immediately available. The government, meanwhile, faced increasing criticism for not having requested help from the European Union. Bucharest should have at least asked for emergency aid in the form of rescue boats and water pumps, parliament member Sulfina Barbu of the governing Democratic Liberal Party said. Under the law, Romania could have requested emergency aid even before the compiling of a total damage estimate, which is only required for reconstruction assistance.
