“Unfortunately a firefighter has died while responding to the flooding,” Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the governor of Lower Austria, told reporters. The area has been classified as a natural disaster area due to the storm.

“For many residents, the upcoming hours will be the worst of their lives,” she said.

Emergency services had made nearly 5,000 interventions overnight in the state of Lower Austria, where flooding had trapped many residents in their homes.

Four thousand homes in the Styrie region were without power and the “peak is yet to come”, Chancellor Karl Nehammer warned on Saturday.

In mountainous areas of the west, snow halted traffic and rescue services were searching for a man reported missing after an avalanche.

Parts of northeast Austria have been declared a natural disaster area.

Some areas of the Tyrol were blanketed by up to a metre (three feet) of snow — an exceptional situation for mid-September, which saw temperatures of up to 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) last week.

Parts of north-east Austria have been declared a natural disaster area.

Some areas of the Tyrol were blanketed by up to a metre (three feet) of snow — an exceptional situation for mid-September, which saw temperatures of up to 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) last week.

In Romania, four people have died in floods triggered by, rescue services said on Saturday.

“We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences,” said Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

“We must continue to strengthen our capacity to anticipate extreme weather events.”

In Romania, four bodies were discovered in the worst affected region, Galati in the southeast, where 5,000 homes were damaged.

Hundreds of people have been rescued across 19 parts of the country, rescue services said, releasing a video of flooded homes in a village by the Danube river.

“This is a catastrophe of epic proportions,” said Emil Dragomir, mayor of Slobozia Conachi village in Galati, where he said 700 homes had been flooded.

Around 100,000 firefighters have been mobilised in the Czech Republic, where four people are missing. Nearly 2,900 incidents were recorded on Friday, most of them due to fallen trees and floods.

Almost 50,000 homes were without electricity on Saturday, Czech power company CEZ said, and a hospital in the southeastern city of Brno was evacuated on Saturday morning.

Neighbouring Slovakia has declared a state of emergency in the capital, Bratislava.

Meanwhile in Poland, one person has drowned and the government warned the situation would be the most difficult in the southwest going into Saturday evening.

Authorities have shut the Golkowice border crossing with the Czech Republic after a river flooded its banks, closed several roads and halted trains on the line linking Prudnik to Nysa.