August 24, 2003	Sunday	Jumadi-us-Sani 25

ZAGREB: Exactly a year after torrential flooding burst the river banks of central Europe and left a legacy of damage, the great heatwave of 2003 is hampering shipping, endangering unique wetlands and costing the weak economies of the region billions.

The river Danube, the lifeblood of central and south-eastern Europe, is at its lowest level in well over a century and the outlook gets bleaker by the day as the prayers for rain go unanswered. The great river can now be forded on the border between Romania and Bulgaria. In eastern Serbia, Nazi battleships immersed on the river bed for almost 60 years have revealed their prows and cannon protruding from the water.

Tonnes of fish have washed up dead in Danube tributaries in Croatia. Hydrofoil traffic between Vienna and Budapest has been suspended. And parts of the wetlands of the Danube delta where Romania meets the Black Sea are being pulverised and turned to mud and dust by the blistering heat.

“The Danube is at its lowest level since records began here in 1888,” said Srdja Popovic, a Serbian environment ministry official.

Rising in southern Germany and flowing almost 1,900 miles through ten countries to the Black sea, the Danube is the second longest river in Europe and the key artery connecting the Balkans with central and western Europe. Four capital cities are built on its banks.

Romanian hydrologists calculated that at 2,359 cubic metres a second, the river’s volume flow is at its lowest for 160 years.

In the delta, officials and environmentalists say, it is too soon to raise disaster warnings about the impact of the drought, but they are worried about the damage being done by the heatwave to the unique wetlands, which are designated a Unesco world heritage site.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.