More than five times the average rainfall for the whole of September has fallen in five days on swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, triggering devastating flooding that has killed 23 people in four countries.
Seven people have died in Poland, seven in Romania, five in Austria and four in the Czech Republic, officials said on Wednesday, with several reported missing, as Storm Boris moved steadily westward to start threatening northern Italy.
In Portugal, the government declared a “state of calamity” late on Tuesday night as dozens of wildfires continued to burn across northern parts of the country. The wildfires have killed at least seven people, destroyed dozens of houses and torn through tens of thousands of hectares of forest and scrubland.
More than 90,000 hectares (347 sq miles) in Portugal have been burned by large-scale wildfires since Saturday, taking the total this year to at least 124,000 hectares. The burned area is the largest since 2017, when the country suffered two devastating wildfires that killed more than 100 people.
In Strasbourg, the EU’s crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarčič, said the flooding in central Europe, combined with this week’s deadly forest fires in Portugal, were joint proof of climate breakdown.
“Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future,” Lenarčič told MEPs. “Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.”
Beyond the human cost, member states were also struggling to cope with mounting damage repair bills and the lengthy recovery periods from disaster, he said. “The average cost of disasters in the 1980s was €8bn. More recently, in 2021 and in 2022, the damage passed €50bn a year, so the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action.
“We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events … are now an almost annual occurrence,” he said. “The global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans.”