Central Europe counts cost of flooding Insurance companies, businesses, farmers and riverside residents are counting the cost of damage running to billions of euros from a week of flooding across southern and eastern Germany and central Europe. The floods were spreading downstream on the Elbe and Danube rivers as recriminations were heard on Friday about inadequate flood protection in the river valleys and an excessive focus on walls and dykes to protect town centres. Politicians were blaming the practices of neighbouring countries for causing more damage downstream as experts warned that flooding disasters were likely to become more frequent and widespread. The city of Dresden, devastated in the last massive floods of 2002 with an eventual cost of up to €8bn, appeared to be surviving the worst of the high water on the Elbe last night but the historic centre of the next-door town of Meissen was largely under water. In neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt, the city of Magdeburg faced unprecedented water levels, above those in 2002, as the swollen waters of the Elbe rushed north towards the port of Hamburg. "We are just a few centimetres from a catastrophe," said Antje Hermenau, leader of the Green party in the state parliament of Saxony, located in Dresden. They protected the old town of Dresden very well, although all the cellars are flooded. If the water was not rapidly pumped out, the cellar walls would collapse and drinking water would be polluted, she said. But the success of upstream towns and cities, in Saxony and across the border in the Czech Republic, in protecting themselves has come at the expense of passing the flood danger downstream. Everybody [upstream] has walls all over the place but the water just gets quicker and deeper. It isn't wise. It is simply passing on the problem," Ms Hermenau said. In southern Germany, the flood waters of the Danube have started to recede, leaving the residents of Bavaria's picturesque riverside towns and villages, such as Passau, Deggendorf and Regensburg, clearing out homes and towing away cars wrecked by the muddy torrent. In Austria, Germany's flood protection measures have been blamed for the extent of flooding downstream. The Danube's waters swept past Vienna and the Slovak capital of Bratislava and on to Budapest, where record water levels were expected this weekend. Reinhold Mitterlehner, Austria's economy minister, blamed "mismanagement" of protection measures in Germany for the extent of the flooding. It was convenient for local communities over the border to force rivers into "corsets" and dispense with flood meadows along their banks, which would normally soak up excess water, he said. We could be about half-ready for the next big flood in 20 years Georg Rast, World Wildlife Fund The same criticism is made in Germany about the failure of the Czech Republic to allow the Elbe, known as the Labe in Czech, to break its banks and flood farmland before crossing the border flowing west. In Prague, there was criticism of the inadequate capacity of storage dams on the Vltava river, which were full by the end of May and allowed to overflow. The first damage estimates in Germany came on Friday from its chambers of commerce and industry (DIHK), which suggested that it would be higher than the €11bn estimated for 2002. It will certainly be far greater than the immediate help of €100m promised from federal funds by Angela Merkel, the chancellor, when she visited Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia to assess the damage on Tuesday. The German farmers" association put the agricultural damage at more than €300m, including waterlogged fields, lost crops and flooded farm buildings. They said at least 150,000 hectares had been flooded and another 100,000 hectares were at risk. But Georg Rast, a water engineering expert with the World Wildlife Fund, said it was too early to calculate the costs. He said the problem was that the German landscape was changing faster than flood-protection infrastructure could keep up and there was not enough space to allow natural flooding on riverside meadows. "We could be about half-ready for the next big flood in 20 years," he said - but the Elbe valley has suffered three big floods in just 16 years.