Germany commemorates last year’s floods

(Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler) Healing the wounds that are still alive and repairing the damage: Germany commemorated on Thursday the deadly floods, linked to climate change, which devastated the west of its territory a year ago and whose scars are always present.

“We have not forgotten the inhabitants of the Ahr valley and we know how many of them are still struggling to rebuild their homes”, declared of this devastated valley last July the President of the Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a moral authority in Germany.

In this western region, thousands of victims are waiting to return home while roads, bridges, water and electricity networks are under construction for months, even years.

The trauma of this disaster of unprecedented scale, which killed 185 people, still haunts those who experienced it on the night of July 14 to 15, 2021: “the dimension of injuries to body and soul is inconceivable” , said in a trembling voice Cornelia Weigand, the head of the Ahrweiler district, during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

These floods shocked Germany and opened its eyes to its vulnerability and the ineffectiveness of its warning services.

“Climate change has reached us, we see it these days with heat waves in large parts of Germany, where forests are burning and groundwater levels are falling, while other regions are affected by bad weather”, underlined Mr. Steinmeier, recalling the urgency of acting to save the planet.

A slate of 30 billion euros

On July 14 and 15, 2021, between 100 and 150 millimeters of rain fell on western Germany, unprecedented precipitation in this country since the start of meteorological records.

Belgium and the Netherlands were also seriously affected. In eastern Belgium, the floods left 39 dead and thousands affected.

During a ceremony Thursday in the presence of the royal couple in Liège (east), Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo paid tribute to “all the heroes” of July 14, 2021 who helped the victims.

Western Germany, in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, paid the heaviest price, with 49 and 135 deaths respectively. Two people are still missing.

The foaming waves of rivers emerging from their beds have carried away everything in their path.

The assessment, not definitive, of the damage is estimated at more than 30 billion euros.

The two regions have more than 85,000 people or households affected and some 10,000 businesses affected.

The heavy rainfall had certainly been announced upstream by the meteorological services, but many residents had not been specifically alerted.

Aid is slow

To avoid new failures, the German government now intends to use the sending of alerts by a mechanism called “Cell Broadcasting”, broadcasting to telephones even if the network is overloaded or disrupted.

Germany also intends to rehabilitate the sirens, many of which had been dismantled in recent years.

A month after the floods, an international scientific study based on statistical models had made the link between this disaster and global warming: in the vast flooded area, from Belgium to Switzerland, scientists were able to determine that the quantity maximum precipitation had increased by 3 to 19% due to this phenomenon.

“A year later, we must not be forgotten, because many people think ‘they must have moved on’, but we are only at the beginning”, warns Alfred Sebastian, the mayor of Dernau, one of the villages in the valley which, according to him, must “be supported financially by the country”.

In this village, a carnival float with three monkeys covering parts of their faces that symbolize “politics, bureaucracy, insurance” shows the concern and expectations in this disaster area.

Thousands of individuals and businesses, caught up in the administrative maze, have not yet received the promised aid.

“I can understand that everything is not fast enough for you”, declared during a ceremony the Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate, Malu Dreyer, assuring “to work hard every day so that the reconstruction goes well for all the world “.

In this region, 500 million euros in aid have been paid out of the 15 billion planned. In the neighboring region of North Rhine-Westphalia, 1.6 billion euros of works have been approved out of an envelope of 12.3 billion.