Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a Facebook video on Sunday, said flood protection efforts in Hungary over the coming days “will be hard but we will manage”.
“I’m standing at the Romai embankment in Budapest right now, an area that will be impassable a day from now,” the prime minister said in the video. “By tomorrow, the large mass of water that is expected to arrive will be where my head is right now, and two metres above that in another day or two. But the water management experts are confident because they say the highest water level won’t exceed the record high.”
“They say that if we could handle the highest-ever flood levels then we can handle a lower one as well,” Orbán said.
He said the three critical areas were the Szigetkoz island plain in north-western Hungary, the Danube Bend and Budapest. The technical liaison officers are in place and will be the ones helping the volunteers “to make sure that all the goodwill shown by the people in the protection efforts is arranged in a meaningful way”, he added.
The prime minister said all the technical and financial resources needed for the protection efforts were in place.
Orbán said Interior Minister Sandor Pinter is in charge of disaster management, adding he was certain that the minister would do a good job handling the flood protection efforts. “And he’s got the government, and — if need be — the prime minister behind him. It will be hard but we will manage,” Orbán added.
Pinter: Flood protection on Danube, Leitha adequate
The interior ministry is organising the flood protection on the Danube and Leitha rivers adequately, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter said in Gyor, in north-western Hungary, on Sunday.
Forecasts indicate that the water levels of the Danube and the Leitha will nearly reach or even exceed the peaks registered in the flood of 2013, Pinter told a press conference, adding that major defence efforts were needed on the two rivers.
The national disaster management and national water management authorities have marked the areas where the rising water levels can cause emergency situations, such as the need to raise the height of the dams or evacuate the locals, he said.
“I’m convinced that there won’t be any evacuations because we can confine the water between the adequate barriers,” he added.
The European Union is also supporting the defence efforts via the Copernicus emergency management service, he said.
The Hungarian Armed Forces has some 17,000 people ready to aid the flood defence work, he said.
Pinter also said that the assistance of the public may again be needed just as in 2013, adding, at the same time, that those who decide to help should only go where the disaster and water management authorities ask.
