According to the Red Cross, rescue personnel were attempting to reach three settlements in western Austria on Wednesday after landslides caused by heavy rains blocked access.
According to a spokesman for the Red Cross in the bordering state of Carinthia, Melanie Reiter, thunderstorms on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday caused streams in the hilly Villach-Land district to burst their banks, resulting in mud and debris landslides.
‘Three villages have been completely cut off… The army and firefighters are trying to clear the streets’ to be able to access the villages, she told reporters.
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She could not immediately say how many people have been affected. As of now, there were no reports of anyone injured, but several houses are believed to have been damaged, she said.
‘It looks very bad up there,’ she confirmed.
Elsewhere in the district, photos showed debris-strewn streets as rivers burst their banks and the wind swept off roofs, according to the Austrian news agency APA.
APA quoted Gerhard Hohenwarter from the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics that in Arriach, one of the villages that were cut off, and other places in the region it ‘rained as much in just a few hours as it does for the entire month for an average June.’
Africa Daily News, New York reports that elsewhere in Europe, Austria is experiencing a heat wave with authorities warning of high temperatures and thunderstorms.
Authorities have issued extreme weather warnings around the globe, while experts warn that these phenomena were more evidence of the impact of climate change.
