By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
For centuries it was a warning nobody wanted to see. When the boulder beneath Budapest's Gellért Hill broke the surface of the Danube, it meant the river had fallen so low that floating mills stopped turning, crops failed, and hunger followed. Hungarians called it Ínség-szikla — the Rock of Starvation.
It has surfaced again, and this time almost in its entirety, along with the sandy riverbed around it, the Guardian reported after traveling 100 miles along the EU's longest river. Geologists and government scientists sent to examine the exposed rock called the sight astonishing.
The drought is not just a curiosity for river-walkers and cyclists now pedaling across dry riverbed. It has forced Hungary to shut down all but one of its Danube-cooled nuclear reactors — plants that depend on the river for cooling water — the first such shutdown in 44 years, according to the Guardian's earlier reporting on the crisis. Some residents along the river are struggling simply to secure drinking water.
The Danube is the EU's longest river, running through ten countries, and its decline this year is being treated by Hungarian officials as an unprecedented energy crisis, not merely a bad summer. What's on the riverbed — dead crops, a stranded legend of a rock, cyclists where boats used to pass — is a fairly blunt illustration of what happens when a river a continent depends on stops behaving like one.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."