After severe rain and deadly floods swept across Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria, at least 14 people were murdered and many more are still missing.
Flooding has killed at least three people in mainland Greece, seven in Turkey, and four on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.
As the storm continues on Thursday, Greece, which has received unusually high rains, is bracing for further flooding.
On Wednesday, Greece received a level 2 of 3 severe storm warning, indicating the possibility of heavy rain and maybe tornadoes.
The storm, which has been given the official name Daniel by the national meteorological organizations in the region, has poured several months’ worth of rain on southeast Europe.
At least three individuals have died as a result of it in Greece. The most recent death was an 80-year-old man killed by floods in central Greece near the town of Karditsa.
On Wednesday, Greek Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias told reporters that the storm was a “unprecedented phenomenon.”
According to him, four people are still missing in Greece’s storm-ravaged central region.
The port city of Volos, some 330 kilometers (190 miles) north of Athens, is still recuperating from the destruction caused by the floods caused by the severe rains recounted by Kikilias. Because so much of the city was still without electricity on Wednesday, Volos’ port was closed.
The Greek state television ERT reported on Wednesday that residents of a nursing home in the city were forced to relocate after a section of the building collapsed due to the rain.
Dimitris Ziakopoulos, a meteorologist with the Greek government’s civil protection service, remarked on television Wednesday that the rainfall “is a huge number for Greek records and for most regions of Europe.” This amount of rain is unusual, according to Greek meteorologists.
Mount Pelion and the city of Volos received 600-800 millimeters of rain in a 24-hour period, according to Greek weather monitors.
The roads on Pelion have collapsed, and hundreds of people have been rescued from the floods by the Greek fire service.
Trikala, Farsala, and Karditsa in central Greece have proclaimed a no-traffic zone.
The Greek government has proclaimed a “totally extreme weather phenomenon,” with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis urging citizens to heed official warnings.
According to the state-run news agency Anadolu, flash floods caused by heavy rain killed at least five persons in Krklareli, Turkey’s northwestern province. The first two bodies were found on Tuesday, followed by the last three on Wednesday.
Two additional people were killed on Tuesday in the Istanbul districts of Başakşehir and Küçükçekmece, according to the Turkish Ministry of Interior’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD).
Severe flooding has also affected the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Four deaths have been confirmed in the municipality of Tsarevo in southern Bulgaria, one of the most hit areas in the country, according to national television BNT.
According to BNT, when the weather improves, electricity and water have been restored to the southern Black Sea shore. According to BNT, water should only be used for non-potable purposes such as cooking and cleaning.
BNT claimed that numerous roads and bridges in the region had been wrecked and that repairs were underway.
“What is expected in the coming days is to evaluate the most urgent repairs that need to be done,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov told BNT on Wednesday.
The torrential rain is the result of a major low-pressure storm. Stormy weather is expected to persist for the next day or two throughout the Mediterranean, as the storm’s center has slowed to a crawl west of Greece.
The storm has all the hallmarks of a “medicane,” a tropical cyclone. These systems, like tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific, have the potential to do catastrophic damage to the Mediterranean Sea and coastal states.
This flooding follows an already brutal summer in Europe, which saw everything from heat waves to devastating wildfires. Scientists believe that as the climate crisis caused by people worsens, the intensity and frequency of these sorts of severe weather occurrences will rise.