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Good morning.
I welcome you here to the early risers’ club. I have good news. The most important news is that the highest water level will leave Hungary not on Thursday, but on Tuesday. But this does not mean that discipline and attention can be relaxed, as the length of Level 3 defences cannot be reduced today. By tomorrow we expect that many areas will no longer be at Level 3, and that lower levels of defence will suffice. But in any case, the good news is that, contrary to our earlier calculations for Thursday, there is a good chance that the highest water level will leave Hungary in a southerly direction on Tuesday. The second piece of good news is that we still do not expect any rainfall that would significantly affect the flow of the flood wave. The third piece of good news is that yesterday afternoon we opened the Moson–Danube flood gate and the Moson–Danube branch has started to ebb. So now we can consider matters in Győr to be complete. Perhaps this is how it can be said.
The peak of the Danube surge is currently in the Dunaföldvár area. I will give you some data on the levels of the peaks, compared to expectations. So, at Mosonmagyaróvár, on the River Lajta/Leitha, there is a loss of 51 centimetres since the peak – or the water has receded that much. At Nagybajcs, on the Danube, it is 188 cm, at Győr 25, at Komárom 97, at Esztergom 52, at Vác 24 and at Budapest 21. So ebbing has started at Budapest as well. I cannot say that I had great success with my appeal yesterday, in which I specifically asked people in Budapest to only go out to see the defence works if absolutely necessary. The situation is somewhat better now, but I would still like to urge everyone to be careful, because an accident might happen and you would trigger a rescue operation: a dam might be breached or surfaces could get slippery underfoot. So I respectfully ask everyone to continue to give priority to the defence operations.
The number of people involved in the defence operations is now steadily decreasing. Yesterday we carried out defence work with 5,344 professionals, and today we will only need 5,025, so there will be 320 fewer people. Yesterday the number of volunteers was 1,286, and we expect to need 324 volunteers today. These are volunteer civilians, because volunteer firefighters, ambulance staff and so on are usually counted as professionals.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The more difficult locations in the defence operations. There is no change at Pilismarót. There are no problems at Dunabogdány, Tahitótfalu and Leányfalu. No change at Vác. Kismaros is defending itself, there is no change there. Kisoroszi: everything as usual. Things are also going well in Budapest, and the people of Budapest will soon get back the Batthyány Square metro station. The situation in the priority defence locations downstream of Budapest is as follows. The level of preparedness has been raised in Báta from 90 per cent yesterday to 100 per cent. In Baja things are in order. At Dunaszekcső we have raised the level of protection to 100 per cent, and we have to look at Madocsa as a new location, where we have to build a temporary defence structure. As I see it, we need to use about 600 sandbags, and during the local government defence operations we need to move what we can out of the floodplain properties. Paks is in order.
So overall I can tell you that the success of the defence operations has lived up to expectations. I have said several times, and I will say it again, that we have a task to do which we have done before. Yesterday I visited the Kvassay sluice, one of the most important water management structures in Hungary. I checked its operation. Through that sluice we will be supplying the water needs of 400,000 people. There we are in the construction phase, just as we are in Esztergom. But fortunately what we are building there is a structure not to protect against high water levels, but the reverse: when water levels are low we will still be able to supply water to the 400,000 people who live in the region. Therefore it will not have an effect on the defence operations, but we will complete that project as soon as the water level goes down.
Thank you very much for your attention.
