Thursday, May 22, 2008

A River Runs Through It

As far as natural disasters go, Hungary is a pretty safe place to live. There aren't really earthquakes, there are no tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc... But, every now and then there are floods.
The Danube river overflows its banks in Budapest every couple years - sometimes every year, and even here in Eger we get our own floods from time to time.
Back some time in the 19th century there was a big flood in Eger, and many of the older buildings in town have marks on them from the high water mark of that flood.
Today there was a flash flood in Eger. I (Nick) was stuck at our church office downtown and not able to come home, because the roads were under water. After a little less than an hour it cleared up and I was able to go home. On the way the roads were all covered in silt and parts of the sidewalk on our street had been washed away!
Also on our street, a sink hole had opened up in the road, and the fire department was there trying to fix things - even now the road is still closed.
Rosemary was at the house with the baby - and had a good time with the neighbors watching the river of water flowing down the street in front of our house.
Something similar happened 3 years ago, when we first moved to Eger; we had to get to church, and I had wade through water to put all the stuff for church into the car!
Nothing near a natural disaster, but for Eger, this was pretty interesting!

Are you in Hungary? Did you have flooding where you live too?

Here are some photos and a video:
The river in front of our house


Firefighters on our street and the hole (taken w/ my phone)


Video of flooded streets downtown (taken by Shane from the window of his workplace)

3 comments:

  1. The baby loves water-and he got to see a ton of it today! We were standing at the front of the house watching, and our door buzzer rang many times...but no one was there! I realized that the hail was hitting the buzzer.

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  2. was your basement flooded?

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  3. Only a little bit.
    Our basement used to be flooded all the time (maybe you remember), but then they put in a sump pump, and things have been ok since then.
    So this storm did flood it out, but the sump pump was able to take care of it.

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