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Emergency teams battle Balkan flood

Towns, villages inundated as Danube bursts its banks

• Gallery: Balkans' battle with Danube

• Map: View the affected area

• Danube hits record high

• Water threatens power plant

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(CNN) -- Thousands of emergency workers in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia are trying to bolster dikes along the swollen Danube River, which has surged to its highest level in more than a century.

Melting snow combined with heavy spring rain caused the river to overflow its banks, and authorities say the worst may be yet to come.

The floodwaters on Monday were surging downstream from Serbia towards neighboring Romania and Bulgaria. Forecasters say the flooding is expected to reach its peak in the two Balkan countries later this week.

Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes and Romanian officials have ordered controlled flooding of farmland to keep water out of populated areas.

A state of emergency has been declared in parts of Serbia as the Danube threatens to flood more of the region. (See a map of the affected area)

Meanwhile, the Tisa River, which flows from Hungary in the north, has started to rise dramatically, The Associated Press reported.

"People are practically running away from the flooded areas with boats, horse carriages and cars," Nicoleta Dragusin, a journalist with Romania's Realitatea TV told CNN.

"There are hundreds of evacuees at this moment living in schools, in safe areas and also in special shelters provided by authorities."

An emergency tent camp for 1,200 people was also being set up just outside the city of Vidin, in northwest Bulgaria, AP reported.

Overnight, the Danube -- Europe's second longest river -- reached an all-time high of 31-feet near Veliko Gradiste, a town 96 kilometers (60 miles) east of Belgrade, AP reported.

In Romania's Brailia province, authorities were preparing to partially destroy an existing dam in a controlled flooding operation aimed at alleviating a river flow of more than 16,000 cubic meters per second.

"We can keep here around 300 million cubic meters of water just to save the situation down river," ministry of agriculture official Stefan Gheorghe told CNN.

Across the region, exhausted emergency workers and volunteers have been deployed round the clock to reinforce defenses and battle the churning waters. (Severe flooding hits parts of Europe)

Zvonko Kostic, a waterways official in the east Serbian town of Smederevo, told AP that few towns and cities in the area had the necessary heavy equipment required to fight the floods.

"The volunteers are tired, it's hard to keep up the tempo day after day," he said.

Mud and slush

Flooding also threatened the Serbian capital as a bottleneck river gorge near the border with Romania caused water to back up and rise upstream all the way to Belgrade, Reuters said.

Duslan Radulovic, a reporter for Radio Belgrade, told CNN that air raid sirens had been sounding out to warn people of the situation.

"There are lots of houses underwater, there are lots of people who are displaced, in some parts neat Belgrade," he said.

"In some parts the water has soaked the dams and embankments and it is impossible to use heavy equipment such as bulldozers to fight the water."

In northern Vojvodina province -- known as Serbia's breadbasket for its wheat and corn production -- the flooding and heavy rains submerged some 25,000 acres of farmland and turned another 500,000 acres into mud and slush.

The waters were expected to have reached their peak on Sunday, but with more rain on the way, experts warned of further flooding, raising health concerns.

"I expect the most significant rise of the water level on Wednesday. I'm afraid the high water could last up to a month," Georgi Linkov, the head of regional civil defense for the inundated Bulgarian town of Nikopol told Reuters.

"The biggest worry now is the inflow of mosquitoes and the stink of sewage coming from the flooded houses."

Many parts of the Balkans are still recovering from floods last year that claimed scores of lives and destroyed houses, farmland and infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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