German floods raise the bar for severe weather

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Days before raging waters swept through western Germany, a European weather agency issued a “severe” flood warning after detailed models showed storms threatening to send rivers to levels a German meteorologist said Friday not seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.

By Friday, those predictions had proven devastatingly accurate, with more than 100 people killed and 1,300 missing, as rescue teams by helicopter lifted stranded residents from sometimes submerged villages within minutes, raising questions about Gaps in Germany’s advanced flood warning system.

Victims and officials said many areas were set unprepared when normally quiet streams and streams turned into torrential rain that washed away cars, homes, bridges and everything else in their path.

“It went quickly. You tried to do something, and it was already too late,” a Sjöld resident told ARD public television in Germany, after the Ahr River swelled its banks, ripping apart wooden-framed houses, and sending vehicles swaying like bath toys.

Heavy rains like the one in Germany are one of the most visible signs of climate change as a result of rising temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that they now occur more frequently for a simple reason: A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, generate more rain, and be more powerful.

But even as extreme weather events are becoming more common around the world — whether wildfires in the American West, or more intense hurricanes in the Caribbean — the floods that have carved a wide path of devastation across Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands this week have almost… No one has heard of it, according to meteorologists and German officials.

However, it was not unexpected.

“There shouldn’t be a lot of deaths from this event,” said Dr Linda Speight, a hydrometeorologist at Britain’s University of Reading, who studies how floods happen. She blamed poor communication about the high risk of flooding as contributing to the huge loss of life.

For now, German politicians have expressed their unwillingness to appear to be politicizing a disaster, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said she plans to visit the stricken state of Rhineland-Palatinate, after returning from talks in Washington.

But a natural disaster had all the hallmarks of an event that once reshaped political fortunes in German election seasons like this.

“Our state is experiencing a flood disaster of historic magnitude,” Armin Laschet, the conservative leader of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is vying to succeed Ms Merkel after the national elections on September 26, said at a news conference on Friday.

“We have to make the country more climate-resilient,” said Mr. Laschet, who is facing his strongest challenge from the environmental Green Party. “We have to make Germany climate neutral faster.”

But his state has been among the hardest hit, and once the floodwaters recede, he and Ms. Merkel may face questions about why their political strongholds are not better prepared.

German officials said Friday that their alert system, which includes a network of sensors that measure river levels in real time, is working as it was supposed to. The problem, they said, was the amount of rain they had never seen before – falling so fast that it covered even small streams and rivers not normally considered threats.

Describing the events of recent days as a 100-year flood would be an understatement, said Uwe Kirsch, a spokesman for the German weather service, describing it as a flood the likes of which we have probably not seen in a thousand years.

“With these little rivers, they have never seen anything like this,” said Mr. Kirsch. “No one can prepare because no one expects something like this.”

On Tuesday, Felix Dich, a meteorologist for the German Weather Service, went on YouTube to warn that some areas of southwestern Germany could receive previously unimaginable amounts of rain. He warned that up to 70 liters, or more than 18 gallons, of water could leak over one square meter in a few hours.

The Weather Service, a government agency, has assigned its most extreme storm warning, code purple, to the Eifel and Moselle regions. It was one of several warnings issued by the weather service to Twitter and other media earlier this week that were also sent to state and local officials, fire departments and police.

But the waters rose so quickly, to heights that exceeded previously recorded record levels, that some communities’ response plans became completely inadequate while others were caught completely by surprise.

A spokesman for the office responsible for monitoring floods and alerting local officials in the Rhineland-Palatinate said all warnings had been received from the Met Office and sent out to local communities as planned.

But what happened next is critical, and not entirely clear.

In the village of Müsch, at the junction of the Ahr and Trierbach rivers, Michael Stoffels, 32, said he received no warning from the government, but a neighbor called to alert him that the water level was rising rapidly on Wednesday.

He rushed home from the retail store he runs nearby to save what he can. He said he was lucky to have storage on the ground floor and his living area is higher than that, so the 12 feet of water that his house used up didn’t cause much damage.

But the village of 220 people was so battered by flash floods that one resident, Maria Vazquez, said it did its job in less than two hours. Friday evening, it was without electricity, running water or mobile phone coverage.

The river banks were scenes of devastation, with cars crashing and huge tree trunks crashing, while mud and debris covered the many cobblestone streets. Truckloads of broken furniture, tree branches and bits of stone were slowly pushed over the malfunctioning power lines.

“A lot of good cars have been wrecked or wrecked,” said Ms. Vasquez, who works at a nearby auto repair shop. “I work with cars, which is sad, but I hope everyone is fine”

On Friday, Belgian Prime Minister Alexandre de Croo said that across the border in Belgium, 20 people had been confirmed dead and 20 were still missing, describing the floods as “the most catastrophic our country has ever known”.

Water rose in lakes in Switzerland and across waterways in the Netherlands, leaving hundreds of homes without power and drowning downtown Valkenburg in the Netherlands, although neither country caused deaths or destroyed German cities.

Medard Roth, Mayor of Cordel, Rhineland-Palatinate, defended the warning systems and said he activated the emergency flood response in his town as soon as he was alerted that the Kiel River water was approaching dangerous levels. But the water rose too quickly to be held back by the usual measures.

“The Cordel fire brigade has already started on Wednesday afternoon at 3:30pm putting in place security measures,” Mr. Roth told Germany’s Bild newspaper. “By 6 pm, everything was already under water. No one could have predicted that.”

During an online presentation on Friday, Ursula Heinen Esser, the environment minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said floodwaters had reached “levels not previously recorded”.

The German flood warning system leaves it up to local officials to decide what action to take, based on the theory that they are better familiar with the local terrain and the people or property in the path of an overflowing river.

In some cases the warnings appear to have been issued in a timely manner. In the city of Wuppertal in a valley bisected by the Wober River, a crisis committee comprising police, fire department and city officials used social media to urge people to stay home.

Early on Thursday, shortly after midnight, they sounded sirens, which sound eerily like the kind used during World War II, to alert residents to move to higher floors or evacuate as the waters rose.

City spokeswoman Martina Eckermann said Wuppertal has suffered property damage, such as flooding, in the orchestra pit at the local opera house, but there have been no deaths.

But in other places the warnings came too late.

In the Arweiler region of neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, regional officials issued their first warning to residents living near the river’s banks as it approached a record level of 3 metres, or nearly 10 feet. The emergency was not declared until three hours later, as the waters surpassed the previous flood record.

By that time, many people had fled to the upper floors of their homes, but those who could not move fast enough died, like the 12 handicapped residing in a nursing home in Senzig, who were not alerted in time to receive help from their land. Ground rooms before the water flows.

“The warnings have arrived,” said Mr. Kirsch of the German weather service. But the question is why the evacuations were not done sooner? This is something we have to think about.”

Written by Melissa Eddy in Berlin, Jack Ewing in Frankfurt, Megan Specia in London, and Stephen Erlanger in Mush, Germany.

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