Published: May 21, 2010

WARSAW: The death toll from floods, which have swept Poland for the past week, rose to nine on Friday, officials said, as the waters which have battered the south finally reached the capital Warsaw.

"Nine people have died, and three are missing. The latest victim was a 70-year-old man who drowned in his house in Tarnobrzeg," national rescue service spokesman Pawel Fratczak told foreign news agency, referring to a town in the southeast.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Friday presented parliament with a report on the floods sparked by torrential rains, saying their scale was "without precedent in the past 160 years".

"We're talking about damage worth about 10 billion zlotys" (2.43 billion euros, 3.28 billion dollars), he said. "The situation in the River Vistula basin is much worse than in the last major floods of 1997."

The Vistula winds in an s-shape across Poland for 1,050 kilometres (650 miles) from the mountainous south to the Baltic Sea in the north.

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