After the flooding caused by persistent heavy rains in southern Austria, there is no relief in sight. In St. Paul in the Wolfsberg district in Carinthia, the authorities expected another flood wave on Saturday – as a precaution, 70 households were evacuated on Friday evening, as the APA news agency reported. For Saturday, the authorities are expecting chaos in holiday traffic on the Austrian-Slovenian border due to the flooding.
Numerous residents in St. Paul were asked on Friday to pack up their most important things and leave their houses. “The forecast is so high that we have to expect another flood wave,” said the district governor of Wolfsberg, Georg Fejan, at night on ORF radio Carinthia. The residents of the endangered buildings had been evacuated and flood protection elements had been set up, he said.
The situation was also critical in Viktring, a southern suburb of the state capital of Klagenfurt am Wörthersee. The fire brigade had to pump out a retention basin there in the evening, which threatened to overflow.
Civil defense alarm in several regions of Austria
According to Radio Carinthia, “some houses also had to be evacuated” in Lavamünd after there were landslides there. A campsite in the Völkermarkt district was threatened by flooding. A civil defense warning was issued for nine municipalities in Carinthia, and civil defense alarms were issued in the municipalities of St. Paul im Lavanttal and Loibach.
In the first part of the night, however, the rain was not quite as heavy as feared, according to Radio Carinthia at around 3.30 in the morning. A total of 1100 fire brigade operations were counted in the southernmost Austrian province. 2,500 firefighters and 100 army soldiers are in action, it said on Saturday morning on ORF radio.
In Styria, civil defense warnings were issued for the districts of Deutschlandsberg, Leibnitz and Southeast Styria, and there was a disaster alarm in five communities. On the night of Saturday, a retirement home in Leibnitz also had to be evacuated, the radio station Ö3 reported. A total of 27 residents were taken to emergency shelters.
The Austrian Federal President Alexander van der Bellen called on the affected population to be more careful and considerate. “Keep taking good care of each other,” Van der Bellen wrote on Friday night on Twitter, which was renamed “X”. Van der Bellen and Federal Chancellor Karl Nehammer also thanked the emergency services working in the storm area.
Several dead in floods in Slovenia
Severe storms also hit neighboring Slovenia on Friday. According to the police, three people died in floods and landslides within 24 hours in the north-east and in the center of the country. Sirens sounded in the capital Ljubljana and in the cities of Maribor and Celje on Friday after the environmental agency declared the highest red alert due to heavy rains that started overnight.
The situation in the Koroska region in the immediate vicinity of the flood plains in Austria was particularly critical. In the mountainous area, some places were cut off from the outside world or only accessible via Carinthia.
Chaos is expected on the streets on Saturday given the flooding. On the Karawanken Autobahn (A11), which is already heavily used, there could be massive traffic jams for holidaymakers. According to Ö3, there was already a “kilometre-long traffic jam” in the direction of Slovenia at 6:00 a.m. in front of the Karawanken Tunnel, so the waiting time was one and a half hours.