Karácsony said on Facebook that the lower embankments on both the Buda and Pest sides of the river will be closed to traffic from Monday evening, and he asked the owners of cars parked there to move their vehicles.
A four-kilometer clay dyke will be built along the Romai embankment of the river in northern Budapest, he added.
Karácsony said the city’s Margaret Island will be protected with sandbags, adding that this will be done with the help of machines so no volunteers are needed for the time being.
He said the largest flood of the past 10 years was forecast to reach Budapest and it is expected to last long because rain continues on the Danube’s water catchment areas.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a Facebook video on Sunday, said flood protection efforts in Hungary over the coming days “will be hard but we will manage”.
“I’m standing at the Római embankment in Budapest right now, an area that will be impassable a day from now,” the prime minister said in the video. “By tomorrow, the large mass of water that is expected to arrive will be where my head is right now, and two meters above that in another day or two. But the water management experts are confident because they say the highest water level won’t exceed the record high.”
“They say that if we could handle the highest-ever flood levels then we can handle a lower one as well,” Orbán said.
He said the three critical areas were the Szigetköz island plain in north-western Hungary, the Danube Bend, and Budapest. The technical liaison officers are in place and will be the ones helping the volunteers “to make sure that all the goodwill shown by the people in the protection efforts is arranged in a meaningful way”, he added.
The prime minister said all the technical and financial resources needed for the protection efforts were in place. Orban said Interior Minister Sándor Pintér is in charge of disaster management, adding he was certain that the minister would do a good job handling the flood protection efforts.
“And he’s got the government, and — if need be — the prime minister behind him. It will be hard but we will manage,” Orbán added.
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