The staroste (chief administrator) of Kłodzko County withheld information about the burst dam in Stronie Śląskie on Sept. 15 for “several dozens of minutes,” reported wPolsce24 TV.
“She could have warned the residents about the approaching flood earlier, but she did not do so,“ the station said, adding that in such a situation, even this amount of time is a lot, as “residents could have tried to save their belongings, but they did not get such a chance.”
Law and Justice (PiS )MEP Michał Dworczyk commented on X, saying: “As reported by wPolsce24, the Kłodzko County head waited more than half an hour to provide information about the embankment break at the dam in Stronie Śląskie! During the flood operations, the director of the crisis management department resigns from his job. Things are going badly in the Kłodzko district office.”
In another report from last week by RMF24, Kłodzko Mayor Michał Piszko said, “The dam in Stronie Śląskie was neglected, and people were exposed to danger.” It was the breach of the dam that led to the huge scale of the flood, with the river devastating Stronie Śląskie, Lądek-Zdrój and Kłodzko.
The dam broke at 10:35 a.m., and Wody Polskie officially confirmed it only after 1:00 p.m. Lack of telephone communication was blamed, but the mayor of Kłodzko does not believe this.
County head Jędrzejewska-Skrzypczyk also admitted that she had received a call at 12:13 p.m. from the mayor of Stronie Śląskie, who, despite the choppy connection, had told her that the dam had broken.
She then asked Wody Polskie to verify this information by phone. In response, she received an e-mail stating: “At the moment, the dam is stable, only the overflow of water through the earth dam may lead to a breach.”
Despite noting that the dam has “a drainage system that lowers the water level in its body,” Wody Polskie also communicated that “the evacuation of the population itself is justified because the reservoir has ceased to function due to the use of 100 percent of the flood reserve.”
The staroste of Kłodzko, however, sent a reassuring message to residents, who were also anxiously following what was going on.
That night, the mayors of both Stronie Śląskie and Kłodzko appealed for residents to self-evacuate from threatened areas. However, many people, not realizing the scale of the threat, ignored these requests. The next day, after the dam had broken, some were evacuated by helicopters because the river current was too fast to do so from the water.
The breach of the dam on the Morawka River in Stronie Śląskie ended up causing a massive flood wave down the Biała Lądecka River down the Nysa Kłodzka catchment area, devastating Stronie Śląskie, Lądek-Zdrój and Kłodzko, among other towns.
Kłodzko Mayor Piszko said the state-run Polish Waters could have also notified the District Crisis Management Centre via the Internet because the network was operational.
Jan Kalfas, who was then the head of crisis management in Kłodzko County who resigned after the flood, said that decisive steps should have been taken even then. He said that “the biggest mistake made by Wody Polskie was in the matter of communication,” adding that he also called the person responsible for Wody Polskie in our area, who “reassured (him) that the situation was normal.”
