By the third night of rain, the situation in the command centre had escalated from tense to critical. Mateusz Fryn, the deputy firefighter chief in St Pölten, Austria, told his colleagues to stop filling sandbags and pumping water out of basements. Instead, it was time to focus on saving lives.
“It was no longer about acting, it was about reacting,” said Fryn, standing in front of a map of the town and pointing to water-logged areas that had needed rescue operations.
Two dozen people were killed across eastern and central Europe when Storm Boris brought an almost unprecedented deluge to parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia last weekend. Up to five times the average monthly rainfall for September fell in just four days, leaving picturesque towns across the region inundated and residents picking up the pieces.
The death toll adds to the hundreds killed by floods around the world in recent days, inundating communities from Nigeria to Myanmar.
Just 31 miles (50km) separate St Pölten from Vienna but the damage that last weekend’s floods wreaked in each location is hard to compare. The Austrian capital escaped widespread destruction thanks to retention basins big enough to dissipate the one-in-1,000-year flood on the River Wien, a tributary of the Danube, limiting damage largely to roads and railways.
But in the surrounding state of Lower Austria, which declared itself a “catastrophe region” as riverbanks burst and basements filled, defences were overwhelmed time and again. Calm brooks swelled into furious rivers that tore through towns, washing away livelihoods and leaving houses perched on treacherous terrain.
“Two days ago, when I heard more rain falling again, my heart started to pound,” said Fryn. “And if that’s how I responded, you can imagine how people who’ve lost everything must have felt.”
As deadly floods continue to surge through more of Europe – sweeping away homes, displacing communities, and wrecking critical infrastructure – the first people hit by the flooding have begun the arduous cleanup. Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the governor of Lower Austria, said rebuilding destroyed regions would take “not days, weeks or months, but years”.
Scientists estimate that river floods cause €7.6bn (£6.4bn) of damage a year in the EU and UK, and the bill is expected to explode as the planet heats up and the exposed population grows. On Thursday, the leaders of Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia met Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who announced €10bn in aid for member states hit by “heartbreaking” devastation. Karl Nehammer, the Austrian chancellor, said his government would top up its disaster fund to €1bn.
The deadly flooding has thrust climate and nature into the political spotlight in Austria before federal elections next weekend. So far, environmental protection has played little role in the campaigns of most of the big parties, and the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), whose manifesto warns of “climate hysteria” and “Green banning nonsense”, has long topped the polls.
“How many more wake-up calls are needed?” asked Kurt Seinitz, a columnist at the tabloid newspaper Krone, on Monday. “What else needs to happen to make people aware of the need for urgent action against global warming?”
Climate breakdown is one of several factors aggravating floods along Europe’s rivers. A study last year estimated that 83% of the projected economic damage caused by global heating up to 3C above preindustrial levels could be avoided by creating “detention areas” – bathtub-like systems that can temporarily store water during flood peaks. It was the most cost-effective strategy the researchers assessed, ahead of strengthening dykes, flood-proofing individual buildings and relocating communities.
However, authorities across Europe continue to cover land in flood-prone areas with asphalt and concrete – a process known as soil sealing – forcing surface runoff.
The interplay between human influence on the rain and land can be seen in municipalities such as St Pölten, where more rain fell in four days last week than during its wettest autumn on record, leading to retention basins being overwhelmed. In Pottenbrunn, a district that was caught between a swelling brook and river on which a dam failed, drinking water pipes survived but the sewage system failed.
Monica Niccoloso, a traditional brick-maker, said her family’s 150-year-old masonry oven was soaked by the flood water but – “thank God” – her home and office escaped the devastation that hit her neighbours. The situation was “dramatic”, she said, and the end was still not in sight. “Because the water table is so high, it makes no sense to pump out the water right now.”
Matthias Stadler, St Pölten’s mayor, said some communities were being flooded twice – first from river water and second from groundwater. During a visit to Pottenbrunn with the fire service, the road on which they arrived flooded in a matter of minutes, cutting them off and forcing them to escape across a field on higher ground.
Then, on Tuesday, after frenzied pumping had brought water levels down, further rains filled retention basins “in a matter of minutes”, said Stadler, a member of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ). “Emotionally, that was hard … I thought to myself: what have we done to deserve this?”
A report from the campaign group WWF Austria estimated last month that St Pölten had the most soil-sealing per person in the country.
However, a bigger issue is the clearing of the landscape, said Stadler, who questioned the methodology of the study. “Huge surfaces are used for agriculture – we need that, no question – but before, there were ditches, meadow channels and natural barriers between the plots.”
Climate and nature have become polarising topics in Austrian politics. Nehammer’s coalition government nearly fell apart in June after the climate minister, Leonore Gewessler, from the Greens, voted in favour of an EU law to protect nature, defying the wishes of her coalition partners, the centre-right Austrian People’s party (ÖVP). Public prosecutors last week threw out a corruption lawsuit the ÖVP filed against her.
“All these measures to protect our climate, environment and soil are ultimately about protecting people,” said Gewessler. “It is on us to save nature, because it is us humans who need nature’s protection the most.”
A survey conducted during the week of floods by the KONTEXT Institute for Climate Matters, an independent thinktank, found majority support among Austrian voters of all parties for 13 of 22 climate statements put to them. They include the desire for less soil sealing, a faster shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and more measures to adapt to extreme weather.
The next government must be ambitious and courageous in its climate policy to hit its 2030 targets, said Katharina Rogenhofer, the chair of KONTEXT. “A comparison with election manifestos shows that the ÖVP and FPÖ, in particular, have to catch up to do justice to the will of their respective voters.”
The ÖVP and FPÖ did not respond to a request for comment.
In spite of the political divisions, back in St Pölten city hall, Stadler described how neighbours had banded together in the face of the crisis, as volunteer firefighters and other rescue services had quickly sprung into action.
“It makes me happy that there is such cohesion within society,” he said. “What troubles me a little is that we need such a catastrophe for it to occur.”
