A man has died after torrential rainfall and storms flooded the Adriatic Sea port town of Rijeka in northern Croatia.
Huge amounts of water drenched the entire town on Wednesday evening, submerging streets and flooding homes and drainage systems.
Officials said 130 litres per square metre of rain fell in two hours — the equivalent of an average month of rain.
“The drainage system was the problem, it could not take all the water,” said firefighter Mladen Sculac.
Emergency crews had to evacuate a group of children from a playroom in Rijeka, while a local school and dozens of other buildings were damaged in the flooding.
Police found a man’s body under a car in a street where traffic had been halted because of the storm.
“We had hundreds of calls,” said Hinko Mance, another senior emergency official in Rijeka. Though the situation has normalised, the work to clear the damage continues on Thursday, he added.
Experts have linked freak storms, floods and droughts to climate change.
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