By Niki Kitsantonis and Isabella Kwai

ATHENS — Violent storms have pounded parts of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey with extreme amounts of rain, causing floods that killed at least 13 people, ravaged roads and prompted evacuations.

In Greece, where record rainfall has swamped the country’s central region this week, the death toll stood at three, after authorities on Wednesday (6) recovered two more bodies. Thousands of households were cut off from power and running water.

In Turkey, seven people were killed by flooding in the northwest late on Tuesday (5), according to the interior minister. And Bulgarian officials said Wednesday that three people had died in floodwaters on that country’s Black Sea coast.

Greece’s fire service said Wednesday that it had received more than 2,000 calls for help in 24 hours. Among the hardest hit areas was the city of Volos, where video showed rivers of water in the streets, uprooted trees and cars washed up on beaches.

The damage to roads and bridges was so great that Volos had effectively been “cut in half,” its mayor, Achilleas Beos, told Greek television.

The rising waters stranded residents and commuters such as Stavroula Kiriakou, who was trapped for four hours at the Volos railway station on Tuesday after the flooding halted trains. “We were scared to cross the road — the floodwaters were gushing down the street, so we climbed onto benches outside the station and waited there,” she said in a telephone interview. Eventually, she said, she managed to leave by linking arms with other passengers and wading across the road in knee-high water.

Greece’s weather authority has said that the heavy rain and storms would continue in many areas until Thursday. With the ground already saturated, more rain could compound the flooding. The country had already battled a wildfire crisis this summer that ravaged areas of the country and led to mass evacuations.

Some areas, such as the village of Kofi in Magnesia, had received close to 18 inches of rain in the previous 48 hours, the weather authority said. The average rainfall for a full year in the Greek capital, Athens, is around 16 inches.

“We’re accustomed to seeing more extreme weather due to climate change,” said Konstantinos Lagouvardos, research director at the National Observatory of Athens. “But this is something else — an extreme, extreme weather event,” he said, adding: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

-New York Times