By IANS
London : Parts of Britain, Germany and Switzerland were left flooded Sunday, Denmark and Sweden braced for very heavy rainfall, while a tornado hit Poland and the heat wave continued in eastern and southwest Europe.
Parts of the English Midlands and areas to the west were left paralysed by floods Sunday, as helicopters were called in to rescue the stranded, and drinking water threatened to run out in one area.
Britain's Environment Agency had issued eight severe flood warnings for the counties of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, while in Worcestershire 100 people were evacuated by helicopter as over 1,000 people spent the night in emergency shelters, reports DPA.
Floods that left small-town streets accessible only by boat caused damage running into "hundreds of millions" of pounds, according to estimates by the Association of British Insurers.
The flooding also caused widespread road and rail traffic disruption both in directly affected areas and beyond, where services could not reach final destinations.
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told a BBC interviewer: "This was very, very intense rainfall, with five inches in 24 hours in some areas, even some of the best defences are going to be overwhelmed."
Meanwhile the rest of Europe also saw extreme weather conditions, some of a very different kind. Germany had torrential rain that caused flooding in parts of the country early Sunday. A state of disaster was declared in two regions of the southern state of Bavaria close to the city of Nuremberg.
Police said choked streams burst their banks and the waters, in many places a metre and a half deep, invaded homes and caused underground home-heating oil tanks in yards to float free of the soil.
The flooding, only 48 hours after an earlier round of downpours in the area, cut Germany's Autobahn 73 for several hours and stranded hundreds of motorists. They had to be taken to safety by firefighters, leaving their cars on the highway.
The water also washed out the railway line between the cities of Erlangen and Bamberg.
Further south in Switzerland, thunderstorms lashed the Swiss capital Berne Saturday evening, causing landslips and flooding low-lying homes. A main highway near Interlaken was blocked by a slip and a rail link was cut.
The national weather services in Denmark and Sweden have issued warnings of heavy rainfall that could cause flooding in several regions.
In Denmark, the eastern islands of Sealand, Lolland, Falster and Mon were forecast to get 40 to 80 millimetres of rainfall Sunday, the Danish weather service DMI said.
Southern Sweden was also preparing to be drenched by rainfall and strong winds, the Swedish weather service SMHI said.
However, temperatures across eastern and southwest Europe threatened to top 42 degrees Celsius in a heat wave that has killed nine people in Romania, and caused havoc from Hungary to Greece.
Meteorologists said temperatures could get even higher in Romania's southern regions on the Danube river border with Bulgaria, where forest fires have ravaged thousands of acres.
Greece has also been badly hit by forest fires over the past month as it goes through its hottest summer in more than a century.
In an extremely rare occurrence for Europe, Poland was hit by a tornado, and news channels showed roofs ripped off farmhouses and barns. Large parts of southern Poland near the city of Czestochowa were left without power for up to twelve hours.