Bodies pulled from submerged homes in Balkans flooding

Serbian army soldiers evacuate people in an amphibious vehicle in the flooded town of Obrenovac, east from Belgrade, May 17, 2014.[Photo/Agencies]

'WAIT AND HOPE'

"Now we have to sit and wait, to wait for that next wave and to hope," Vucic told a joint news conference with Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.

Of the Bosnian death toll, Dodik said: "I'm afraid that won't be the end."

In the Bosnian border town of Bijeljina, authorities said they would evacuate 10,000 people. More than 15,000 have already been evacuated in Serbia.

"We left behind the car, motorcycle, tools, all our furniture, valuables," said Dragana Ilic, an Obrenovac resident evacuated to a shelter in Belgrade.

"We just grabbed our mobile phones and left. All our IDs were left behind. The whole house is under water."

Another evacuee from Obrenovac at the shelter, a student who gave her name as Katarina, said she was worried about her uncle. "I last spoke to him at around 11 (0900 GMT) yesterday, and since then I have no information on where he is or what he's doing," she said. "I only know that it's wet, cold, and there's no electricity or running water."

In Bosnia, helicopters evacuated people from the northern towns of Samac and Modrica and trucks and bulldozers carried food to the hardest hit areas.

About 1,000 people, including babies, pregnant women, invalids and elderly were evacuated from the region of Zeljezno Polje in central Bosnia, where hundreds of homes were destroyed in landslides.

"I think we'll never be able to return to our village," local Muslim imam Zuhdija Ridzal told Reuters by telephone from Zeljezno Polje. "It has disappeared".

On Friday Serbia's state-run power utility Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) trimmed output at its largest hydro power plant, Djerdap 1, on the Danube river by a quarter.

It also closed down 1,650 MW in capacity of its largest coal-fired power plant Nikola Tesla (TENT), on top of a 10 percent cut in total output a day before.

Flooding of the Kolubara, the Danube and the Sava rivers brought down cables and transformer stations, soaked coal depots that feed the power plant and caused a fire inside the Kolubara complex which had been shuttered since Thursday.