It’s been extremely wet in Croatia recently. Thunderstorms have been chucking it down since Sunday afternoon and the rainfall totals have been exceptional. Indeed, in southern Croatia we’ve just seen the heaviest rain for half a century.
With such heavy rain it’s not surprising that there are problems with flood waters. In the southern coastal city of Marina the city centre was inundated with about 1.5 metres (5 feet) of water. Residential areas were only accessible by boat and there was at least one casualty.
Sibenik, an historic coastal city, was also hit hard by the flood waters. A world heritage Cathedral, several other churches, museums, municipal buildings and scores of houses all suffered damage from the inundation. A spokesman for the city said that rain of such intensity hadn’t been seen since 1949.
Further north in Croatia the rain was also falling very hard. The city of Split, on the Adriatic coast, collected 142mm (just over 5.5 inches) of rain in the 18 hours up to midday yesterday. That is about 30mm more rain than you would expect to see in the whole of December and gives a pretty good idea of what the situation was like.
The weather here looks a bit more settled in the next few days but at least some rain can be expected along the Adriatic coast.
We have also seen recent flood problems in southern Russia, but here the problems were caused by a slightly different reason. The Labinsk district lies in the foothills, just to the north, of the Caucasus mountains. Warm southerly winds caused huge volumes of snow in the mountains to melt quite rapidly. As a result, river levels quickly rose above danger levels and then overflowed. About 42 square kilometres of rural land, with a population of around 2000 was covered in flood water. There are no reports of any injuries but the situation turned critical so quickly that people were unable to save a large number of animals and poultry.
