As you know, we don’t have a television, so we were probably the last people to see images of the flooding here in Austria. We just got back from my wife’s parents’ house where we watched the news.

It’s really bad. Two good things, though: the rain is letting up and there has been a fairly large wave of solidarity throughout Austria, with many people donating money and goods (blankets, refrigerators, etc) to help the people who’ve lost everything, and there are several thousand of them. On the negative side, though, although smaller creeks and rivers are beginning to recede, the Danube is still rising because some smaller dams and dikes that had held up are finally beginning to break, and there is new flooding in Bavaria and the Czech Republic (parts Prague under water, etc). And all that water eventually flows past my house.

But it looks like the worst is over in Austria.

I stayed home from work today in case I would need to pump out my cellar or otherwise perform flood-related activities. I went out in the morning and took some pictures of the creek that flows past my house, it is a tributary of the Danube [ouch, a tortoise is biting my foot]; later in the morning, I went to the bank to pay some bills and took some pictures of the Danube. In the pictures, water levels are way up from normal. Another six feet, about, and we’d have serious flooding. They continued to rise a little during the day, two or three feet, but seem to have stabilized now.

The creek near my home. Same creek.
View of the Danube
(The town of Tulln in the background.)
Another view of the Danube, from the Tulln side.