Budapest faces Danube flood surge: Live report from the river

Budapest is flooding, and it’s likely to get worse. CGTN’s Pablo Gutierrez reports live from a canoe.

Transcript

00:00It's a serious situation. We are now in the most severely impacted area here in Budapest by Storm Boris.

00:09This is a residential area. Let me show you around. About two kilometers here of homes are completely damaged by the rising water.

00:21We are talking about at some points maybe four or five meters high.

00:26Now they're telling me, a lot of the neighborhood residents here, they're telling me they're just going to stay here.

00:32They're not going to evacuate. They're going to try to clean up as much as they can.

00:38And they're bracing because this is just the beginning. This is the tip of the iceberg.

00:43We expect the water to rise much higher here. Let me show you right here.

00:48Laszlo, let me show you Laszlo. He has been kind enough to take us around this neighborhood.

00:54But not only has he been showing us how impacted this area is, he's been helping his neighbors,

01:01getting them out of their homes, trying to take them to dry land so they can buy groceries.

01:07They can do the things that they need to do because right now they haven't seen any help from the city.

01:12We've been here for six hours. We've only seen one patrol car.

01:16Now Laszlo is a former Budapest police officer and he's like, he's thinking, he's like, where is the help that we need now?

01:25This area has been damaged before. In 2013, Budapest was wrecked by floods.

01:32They promised they were going to build them a mobile dam, but that hasn't materialized just yet.

01:40Now right here, you're going to see this. This is this tree line right here.

01:44This is where the Danube starts. So this entire area just got swept by the water.

01:53We're going to see a restaurant here. This is a neighborhood restaurant where at this time of the day would be filled with people.

02:01But now completely underwater. And right now we've got to turn around a little bit.

02:07You see this sign right here. After this sign, the current really starts to pick up.

02:13So Laszlo, look, there's some of the debris that's coming out of the river right here.

02:19You see this? One of the concerns that residents have right now is not only the water that will continue to rise,

02:31but we've also seen in some parts some of the sewage starting to come up.

02:36Now, they were told by the city that they basically need just to put sandbags and just wait, wait for some type of help.

02:48But that help has not materialized. In 2013, the floods devastated a large part of Budapest.

02:57And since then, they invested about 300 million dollars in flood protection.

03:05But residents in this area, the only thing that they got was sandbags.

03:11And they say just basically they were left out to their luck.