8B
Wednesday, February 1, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Dutch farming villages evacuate from floods
Netherlands declares state of emergency
The Associated Press
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Dozens of Dutch villages became ghost towns yesterday as 70,000 people fled surging rivers that threatened to break dikes and flood farmlands. At least one person drowned.
Flood waters that killed at least 26 people in northwestern Europe earlier this week began to recede. But the flooding wasn't expected to peak until today in the Netherlands, where most land is below sea level.
On Monday, about 15,000 people left low-lying farmlands on their own volition. Yesterday, the evacuations were mandatory: Dutch authorities declared a state of emergency and ordered tens of thousands of people out of *polders*, farmland reclaimed over the centuries from marsh and river basins.
An additional 100,000 people were asked to leave their homes and were told that evacuations would become mandatory tomorrow if the threat continues.
Dozens of Dutch farming villages along the Maas and Waal rivers were deserted yesterday by residents fleeing with little more than the clothes on their backs.
"The rest of the village has gone," a teen-age girl walking with three children down the empty street of one village told Dutch Television. "But we still have some animals with us, and we cannot leave them behind."
More than a hundred buses rounded up people in Bommelwerwaard, Wamel, Druten and Ooijolder and
took them to evacuation centers. Officials said the evacuation was orderly.
Tens of thousands of farm animals also had to be shipped out of the holders to keep them from drowning.
Jan Roelofs, a crisis center representative in Nijmegen, said the dikes were stable but weak. "But if even one dike burst, some villages would be sunk in up to 16 feet of water. And water could submerge secondary highways and cut off escape routes," he said.
"I have 6,000 chickens," said one farmer over the telephone to the local crisis center at the Waal River town of Beneden-Leeuwen. "I am staying put. You don't get me out."
Dutch farmers prepared for the flood by shipping livestock to market early since they wouldn't be able to graze the animals on flooded land.
The flooding was the worst since 1953, when the North Sea dikes in the southern Zeeland province burst, killing more than 1,800 people. The dikes that were threatened yesterday were not sea dikes but river dikes, and the threat to life was believed to be less extreme.
The first death from the Dutch floods was reported yesterday. A woman drowned in the Waal River village of Winssen, said Ruud Schelder, a representative for the crisis center in the eastern city of Nijmegen.
Thousands of acres of land were under water. But dikes that keep the river water out of the reclaimed areas were holding, with flooding primarily near the banks of the Maas and Waal rivers.
The long lines of evacuation vehicles evoked images of World War II, when residents fled Dutch cities that sustained heavy bomb damage.
One old man told Dutch Television he had left everything to take refuge
in Nijmegen. "What else could I have done?" he asked. "I could have waited, but then it would be too late."
Another person told the television station that heavy traffic made evacuation difficult.
A thousand soldiers were brought in to assist in the evacuation effort, and major Dutch highways were closed to all but emergency traffic to facilitate evacuations.
All canal barge shipping was halted in the area to prevent damage to the dikes.
Flooding, caused by the early melting of Alpine snows and heavy rain, wreaked deadly havoc elsewhere in northern Europe.
The official toll was 15 dead and five missing in France, at least four dead in Germany, five dead and one missing in Belgium, one dead in Luxembourg and one dead in Austria.
The flood waters were slowly receding across western Germany, after the Rhine River crested in Cologne on Monday night at 35 feet 5 inches, equaling a record for this century set in 1926.
Cologne was probably the most heavily inundated German city, with most of the downtown area under about 6 feet of water. Many neighborhoods were passable only by boat.
Parts of other German cities, including Bonn, Frankfurt, Koblenz and Trier. also were flooded.
In Germany's Kleve district across the Dutch border, authorities prepared for possible breaks in Dutch dikes by ordering 5,000 people to evacuate.
The hardest-hit area in France was in the far North, where rising waters from the river Meuse, as the Maas is known there, cut the town of Charleville-Mezières in half.
In Belgium, water levels along most of the Meuse continued to slowly sink from record levels.
THE NEWS in brief
CHICAGO Russian official wants to talk more about sex than politics
Maybe those folks at Woodstock were on to something. Russia's ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky says sex could do a lot for world peace.
"We'll understand one another better if you undress right now," he told Playboy interviewer Jennifer Gould and her translator. Masha Pavlenko.
Zhrinovsky suggested the women might want to lie on a bed and have his two male bodyguards caress them.
Asked if he'd ever had sex with four people, he replied, "Of course. I love to watch more."
"To see how the others do it," he said. "To see the mistakes. Plus, I'm lazy. It inspires me to the passion of youth." said is "best when it's with a group."
Political questions didn't always yield the expected with Zhirinovsky, who talked with Playboy in August. The interview appears in the March issue, which will be on sale Tuesday.
And would he like to meet Cuba's Fidel Castro?
"I'm always in favor of making contacts, no matter with whom." he said.
He told the women they were selfish.
"Yet you are two healthy women, and you don't want to enter into a healthy relationship with two healthy men," he said. "You push them toward war by not letting them enter an intimate relationship. If each Chechen man would have a woman, there would be no war. That's why you're the source of war on the planet."
INDIANAPOLIS
PROMO lands employees in trouble
Eli Lilly and Company disciplined two employees for handing out brochures on the company's antidepressant Prozac at a seminar on depression for high school students.
The Indianapolis-based company took the action after some parents complained that the school event last month in Maryland had been turned into a commercial promotion.
"It was a clear error in judgment." Lilly representative Edward West said Monday. "It should not have happened. That's the very kind of behavior that calls these valuable programs into question."
West would not name the employees yesterday, nor would he disclose the disciplinary actions taken against them. He would not say whether they still worked for the company.
Lilly helped pay for the seminar at Walter Reed Johnson High School in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md.
A doctor who was to address the students on depression ran late, and the two Lilly employees were asked to fill in the time, West said.
They did not mention Prozac by name in their remarks, he said, but they handed out brochures on the drug and distributed pens and pads of paper bearing the Prozac name so the students could fill out a questionnaire used to screen for depression.
West said he didn't know how many students took part; The Indianapolis Star said it was more than 1,000.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK Super Bowl XXIX a TV ratings bust
About 39 million households tuned in to the 49-26 victory Sunday on ABC for a 41.3 rating and a 63 share, Nielsen Media Research said yesterday.
The San Francisco 49ers' rout of the San Diego Chargers drew one of the smallest TV audiences in Super Bowl history.
Super Bowls, only seven have drawn lower ratings. Each ratings point equals 1 percent of the estimated 95.4 million TV homes in the United States, or about 954,000 households. The share is the percentage of in-use sets tuned to a particular program.
The highest-rated Super Bowl was in 1982, when San Francisco defeated Cincinnati. CBS got a 49.1 rating from the game. The lowest-rated Super Bowl was the first, in 1967, when CBS and NBC both broadcast the game. CBS got a 22.6 rating and NBC an 18.5.
Last year, the Dallas Cowbirds' victory against the Buffa lo Bills produced a 45.1 rating and a 66 share for NBC.
It is extremely rare for any show to top a 40 in ratings.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Attorneys beaten with tape recorder
A convicted killer barred from taping his trial beat up his two defense attorneys with a tape recorder yesterday, briefly halting the trial.
John Asonius, 41, was overpowered by guards and dragged from court as his public attorneys wiped blood from their foreheads, the news agency TT said.
The proceedings resumed hours later, with the attorneys sitting farther away.
Asonius' outburst came at the beginning of his second trial. He was convicted last year of shooting nine darkskinned foreigners, killing one Iranian. He also was convicted of bank robberies.
Prior to yesterday's outburst, several public attorneys declined to defend Asonius. They said Asonius was too violent.
Compiled from The Associated Press.
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