With the help of added gravel and sandbags, the dike held floodwaters back overnight, but new cracks appeared early Friday. On Thursday, thousands more residents of towns behind the dikes were evacuated. The waters of the Oder, which form the border between Germany and Poland , remain high. River levels farther south in Poland and the Czech Republic, where more than 100 people were victims of flooding, are receding. Torrential rain over the past three weeks has caused some of the worst flooding in this century, inundating hundreds of Polish and Czech towns.
Damage is estimated in the billions of dollars.
Non-stop sandbagging around a major tear prevented a complete break Thursday, but cracks in the dike prompted the evacuation of another 8,500 residents from the Oderbruch plain, according to an Associated Press report. Five thousand people were evacuated from the most endangered spots last week.