PRAGUE: Cities in Germany and the Czech Republic were scrambling Wednesday to stave off potential disaster as a flood wave headed north, sending thousands of people fleeing their homes.
Hungary has also declared a state of alert as waters surge in the mighty Danube, which is also threatening cities in Austria.
In the Czech Republic, where eight people have already perished in the floods, thousands of households in the north were without power, gas and drinking water.
Several cities in the north of the Czech Republic and eastern Germany are threatened by the surging waters of the Elbe river after torrential rains across swathes of central Europe.
In the German city of Dresden, near the Czech border, several hundred people have been evacuated as water levels in the Elbe were forecast to reach up to nine metres.
Across the Czech Republic, over 19,000 have been evacuated since the floods began, firefighters' spokeswoman Nicole Zaoralova said.
Water levels in the Elbe were expected to peak in the Czech industrial city of the Usti nad Labem on Wednesday, said Jiri Petr, a spokesman for the Povodi Labe water company.
The rising river has already forced 3,700 people from their homes in Usti nad Labem, which lies about 30 kilometres from the German border, and flooded the local railway station.
The water levels expected in Usti nad Labem are close to those recorded in 2002 when massive flooding swept central Europe, killing 17 people in the Czech Republic alone.
In addition to the eight people already declared dead, Czech police are still searching for four missing people.
From Usti, the mass of water will head downstream to eastern Germany, where cities on the Elbe, including Dresden and Magdeburg, are bracing for the flood.
In Magdeburg, authorities declared a state of emergency and said they expected the river, normally at two metres, to rise to almost seven metres -- higher than in 2002.
Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times Heritage Wines will host a series of free wine tastings this weekend.
Wendy Carlson for The New York TimesColorful décor and convivial atmosphere define the dining at Spicy Green Bean in Glastonbury, Conn. Let me begin my salute to B.Y.O.B. restaurants with a miser’s confession: I almost never spend more than $50 on wine. Whatever your particular price ceiling, bringing your own wine to a restaurant makes sterling sense. That $50 bottle on a restaurant’s wine list probably cost them $19, while they’d charge $100 for the $50 bottle you’re bringing. With the money you save, you can order a lot of extra starters. 
Sliders stacked so high they sway. And you’ll want to order them at Spicy Green Bean. The chef-owner Kathy Denisiewicz’s casual hole-in-the-wall eatery has built a cult following with its wildly eclectic, food-of-the-mood fiesta of delights. The dinner menu, rife with exclamation marks (“Super Duper Suppers!!!”) and neon-colored letters, hews to a simple format: each week, four different appetizers and four different entrees, as well as a big menu of sandwiches, soups and wraps, some listed under “Kooky Konkoctions.” If it sounds cloyingly cute, the food is not. We enjoyed superb starter dishes, one after another. French onion soup contained a floating grilled-cheese sandwich made with sharp Irish Cheddar and bearing a dab of bright-green basil pesto. Pork sliders offered candied slabs of pork belly, fried nearly crunchy, on sweet rolls with lettuce, tomato and sriracha mayo. Equally yummy was a tower of fried green and vine-ripened red tomatoes layered with mozzarella, thin-sliced avocado and a generous pile of crab salad. On and on it went, a jamboree of tastes. We dug eagerly into pancakes mined with spring peas and scallions and topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, dill and capers and bits of red onion. We fought over a plantain stuffed with ground beef and chorizo, welded together with melted Cheddar and slathered liberally with a cilantro-laden tomato salsa. Surf-and-turf sliders, stacked so high they swayed, combined a deep-fried oyster and seared steak and was garnished with lettuce, tomato and a horseradish cream. To make her out-of-this-world shrimp toasts, Ms. Denisiewicz coats slices of country white bread with cream cheese and scallions, crab Rangoon-style, then fries them and tops them with shrimp and a sifting of a secret spice combo from what she calls the Shaker of Love. (“Nice try,” she chuckled, when I asked later for the ingredients.) Our final appetizer, an Asian short rib with macaroni and cheese, wasn’t on the menu, but a woman at the next table was eating it, providing my chance to utter the immortal restaurant line, “I’ll have what she’s having!” And sure enough, the dish proved the high point of the evening, a surreally tasty pork short rib, deep-fried till crisp, then tossed with salt and a sweet chili sauce combining scallions, brown sugar and habanero. After such thrills, some entrees proved anticlimactic. A playful variation on surf-and-turf included a shrimp and crab custard too soupy in consistency and blasted with tarragon; the steak, a generously sized New York strip, got lost amid a busy orchestration of quartered tomatoes, pimento cheese, crisp-fried prosciutto and arugula. Fish Français suffered from an overly brothy sherried herbed butter sauce, with wilted spinach and fried twists of soppressata that overwhelmed the swai, a mild-tasting Asian white fish. Sweet-potato falafel, dry and bland, needed more tzatziki. And a platter of classic Italian treats — breaded fried chicken cutlet and eggplant Parmesan served with a meatball over bucatini in a heavy tomato sauce — seemed aimed at aficionados of diner-style red sauce. Some entrees bowl you over through mass alone. Buttermilk fried chicken, half a bird served on a large tray with baked beans, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese and corn, seemed sized for family sharing. A bowl of linguine smothered basil-and-sundried-tomato-inflected chicken sausage in roasted onions and bell peppers with an over-the-top creamy, cheesy red-pepper Alfredo sauce. A towering Cubano burger took a thick hamburger and piled it high with pulled pork, ham and cheese — a dripping colossus of a meal. I haven’t taken this much food home in a long time. 
