Germany's cultural jewel Dresden suffered its worst flooding in more than a century yesterday and receding waters in Prague began to reveal the damage wrought on the historic Czech capital.
As a huge wave of water flowed along central Europe's rivers, other towns and cities including the Slovak capital Bratislava remained on alert. Floods have killed more than 80 people from the Black Sea to the Baltic and destroyed billions of euros worth of buildings, infrastructure and crops.
A man died yesterday when Czech police blew up five cargo barges which had broken their moorings and were drifting dangerously along the River Elbe. He was hit by shrapnel as he watched the operation from the shore, Czech television reported.
A Czech chemicals factory leaked poisonous chlorine gas after flood waters damaged the building.
Officials said about 3,000 of Dresden's 480,000 residents had been evacuated. Some 800 hospital patients were moved from Dresden and the rest of Saxony. Tens of thousands more Germans were moved from other towns along the Elbe and Mulde rivers.
In the eastern town of Pirna on the Elbe, emergency services began evacuating 30,000 residents. German and American troops helped in the evacuation.
"A second wave of water from the Czech Republic is expected to hit... Further evacuations are going to be needed," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told a news conference.
Countries along the route of the floods struggled to come to terms with the inevitable multi-billion-euro cost of cleaning up after the catastrophe.
Austria said it would cut an order for Eurofighter jets and postpone tax cuts to help fund around one billion euros in aid to its victims.
Schroeder promised hundreds of millions of euros in state support to rebuild private homes and public infrastructure and said he did not care if he had to break European Union rules on financial discipline to raise the money.
Dresden, the Saxon capital and one of Germany's cultural jewels, was almost totally destroyed by British and American bombers in 1945. Reconstruction has intensified in the past decade, since German reunification.
Thousands of works of art in the ornate Zwinger Palace, home to one of Europe's great art collections including Raphael's Sistine Madonna, were moved to higher levels as water flooded its vaults and those of the restored Semper opera house nearby.
The Elbe reached a level of 8.3 metres in mid-afternoon and the river was expected to rise to 8.7 metres last night, its highest since 1845.
Tourists joined local people in unloading sandbags to protect the city. Because of intensive pumping, pedestrians could again walk to some of the city's best-known monuments yesterday even as the river level continued to rise. But in the railway station, water lapped at the top of the windows of abandoned trains.
"We estimate that since Monday, 30,000 people have been evacuated in Saxony as a whole," Irina Duevel, a spokeswoman for a crisis centre set up by Saxony's Interior Ministry, said.
Emergency services said another 35,000 people in the cities of Bitterfeld and Magdeburg in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt were also on stand-by to abandon their homes.
German police said 27 people were missing in Dresden and the region and that number was climbing. There had also been a few incidents of looting.
"A handful of people have been caught in the act of looting but we're lucky that it's not more so far," said regional police spokeswoman Barbara Lorenz.
In Austria, where some 10,000 homes are thought to have been left uninhabitable by floods that have been described as the country's worst disaster since World War Two, the government said it would delay tax reforms to help fund an aid package.
In Bratislava, Slovak soldiers reinforced anti-flood barriers against the Danube's highest level in a century, but officials said the risk of the river overflowing its banks was receding.
Hungarian authorities were keeping an eye on the rising waters of the Danube, but said they were unlikely to breach defences designed to protect Budapest from floods.
The waters were falling in the Czech Republic, where authorities this week moved more than 200,000 people to escape the worst floods since records began over a century ago.
Austrian authorities said the situation there was improving, water levels were falling and Vienna was not threatened.
In Prague, officials began to count the costs as water levels eased on the River Vltava from a Wednesday peak.
With barriers holding the flood waters at bay for the most part, Prague's ancient Old Town was spared. But officials said other areas remained under several metres of water and warned evacuated residents not to return yet.
"Water levels are coming down, but there is nothing to cheer about. It will be days before people can come back home. We have a lot of work ahead," Prague's Mayor Igor Nemec told reporters.
Though flood waters were stopped from sweeping through the Old Town Square and the 14th century Charles Bridge was not expected to be damaged, other centuries-old buildings were feared to have fared worse.
Officials say it will take weeks to put a price on the damage of the worst flooding in Prague's 800-year history, but it is expected to reach at least 60 billion crowns.
"There's a lot we can't see right now because things are still under water," Czech Deputy Culture Minister Zdenek Novak told Reuters.
Twelve people have died in floods in the Czech Republic. Officials in Saxony said yesterday the death toll there had risen to nine. Seven have been killed in Austria and weekend flooding in Russia's Black Sea region killed at least 58.
Officials said yesterday that nearly 100 animals died during an evacuation of Prague zoo, including an elephant, five rhinoceros, a lion, a gorilla and 80 birds.