BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Belgrade braced for a river surge Monday that threatened to inundate Serbia’s
main power plant and cause major power cuts in the crisis-stricken country as the Balkans struggle with
the consequences of the worst flooding in southeastern Europe in more than a century.
At least 35 people died in Serbia and Bosnia in the five days of flooding caused by unprecedented
torrential rain, laying waste to entire towns and villages and sending tens of thousands of people out
of their homes, authorities said.
But the death toll is expected to rise as floodwaters started to recede in some locations, laying bare
the full scale of the damage after three months’ worth of rain fell on the region in three days,
producing the worst floods since rainfall measurements began 120 years ago.
The coal-fired Nikola Tesla power plant supplies electricity for half of Serbia and most of Belgrade. It
is located in Obrenovac, the worst flood-hit town near Belgrade where some 7,800 people have been
evacuated from their homes, which were mostly completely submerged in water. Some 2,000 people are still
believed trapped in higher floors of buildings, without power or phone lines.
Predrag Maric, a Serbian emergency official, said Monday that the situation in Obrenovac is still
critical. He said that so far thousands of soldiers, policemen and volunteers have managed to “defend”
the power plant from the surging Sava River waters by building high walls of sandbags.
Villages between Belgrade and Obrenovac were drenched in muddy waters Monday, as people tried to reach
their houses to see what was left inside.
Wearing rubber boots and pants, a man waded through the water toward his house in the vilage of Kalnic.
Nearby, two cows were tied to a bus stop, nibbling at hay, apparently brought there from flooded barns.

In recent days, surging water has coursed through towns and villages in Serbia and Bosnia and to a lesser
extent in Croatia, flowing across streets and into homes, sweeping bridges off their moorings. Sodden
hills crumbled into landslides. Hundreds of buses and cars were stranded on flooded roads.
The Sava flood wave expected to reach Belgrade between Monday and Wednesday originated in the upper
segment of the river, which forms the border between Bosnia and Croatia.
In Orasje, a Bosnian border town, efforts were made to prevent further spilling of the Sava at the places
the barriers had broken. Ideas included dropping old trucks from helicopters or covering the gaps with
wire frames and then reinforcing with sandbags.
The emergency force commander in the town, Fahrudin Solak, said the decaying corpses of drowned farm
animals now represent a major health risk for the region.
“We are sending out mobile incinerators and we have asked for international assistance, to send us more
incinerators to prevent diseases,” he said.
Floodwaters have also triggered more than 3,000 landslides across the Balkans. In Bosnia, the water surge
disturbed land mines left over from the region’s 1990s war, along with warning signs that marked
location of the unexploded weapons.