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CNN Live Today

Flood Waters Threaten Historic Dresden

Aired August 14, 2002 - 13:04   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Flooding has also struck Vienna and Salzburg, as well as Dresden, the historic city in eastern Germany.
CNN's Gaven Morris is making his way toward Dresden, and he joins us by telephone right now.

Gaven, where are you right now, and what are you looking at?

GAVEN MORRIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol.

We're not too far outside of Dresden, and we're going along the roads with a lot of fire trucks and a lot of emergency vehicles. The problem is that all of that water that Mike Hanna was telling you about in Prague and in the Czech Republic is headed this way. And what they're saying is that the river, Elbe, which goes through Dresden -- Dresden is a very large city, remember. But that river, it's been flooded a week, but it is still yet to peak. When that water from the Czech Republic comes through, they are expecting a peak of maybe 8.5 meters or even more.

So what the authorities have been doing in Dresden is essentially evacuating 30,000 people from the middle of that city, choppers, boats, whatever they can find have been brought in to try and get the people out before that river hits its peak. They're not sure when the peak is going to come yet, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but everybody is on tenterhooks in the city of Dresden.

Earlier, we were in the other state of Germany, Bavaria, which has also had its share of problems over the last few days. The town of Passau, which is a very historic river town, it's on the junction of three rivers, its old town is completely devastated by these floods. That river is sort of 6 meters above where the river levels normally are.

And what you saw there was a lot of mud in all of the businesses along that river right up to the ceiling level, mud, water. It's just starting to subside, and the people are getting back into those buildings to see what tasks they have ahead now -- Carol.

LIN: Gaven, what's being done to try to save some historic artworks and some of the more historic buildings?

MORRIS: Well, this is a crucial thing. I mean, most of these towns, particularly towns like Passau, particularly towns like Salzburg, I mean, that's the birthplace of Mozart. These are rich cultural places. All of these cities were built along the rivers for good purpose. But the buildings that are the oldest are the ones that are most vulnerable. So up until now, they've had good success in getting very valuable artworks, getting, you know, opera houses cleaned and getting them -- you know, key things out of the way.

But the buildings themselves, they are very old, and they've had floods before. But nobody can really tell at this point what damage is being done to these buildings, some of them 500-600 years old -- Carol.

LIN: Oh, thank you very much -- Gaven Morris making his way toward Dresden now, an eyewitness account there of the flooding.

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