Amid clean-up, floods toll goes up in Europe
BERLIN: German officials are defending their preparations for flooding in the face of the raging torrents that caught many people by surprise and left over 190 people dead in Western Europe, but they concede that they will need to learn lessons from the disaster.
Efforts to find any more victims and clean up the mess left behind by the floods across a swath of western Germany, eastern Belgium and the Netherlands continued on Monday as floodwaters receded.
At least 31 people died in Belgium, as authorities said they were calling an end to rescue operations. “Clean-up and estimating the material damage are now in focus,” the country’s crisis centre said late on Sunday.
So far, 117 people have been confirmed dead in the worst-affected German region, Rhineland-Palatinate; 46 in the neighbouring state of North RhineWestphalia; and at least one in Bavaria, parts of which saw heavy rain and flooding.
The downpours that led to usually small rivers swelling at vast speed in the middle of last week had been forecast, but warnings of potentially catastrophic damage didn’t appear to have found their way to many people on the ground - often in the middle of the night.
“As soon as we have provided the immediate aid that stands at the forefront now, we will have to look at whether there were things that didn’t go well, whether there were things that went wrong, and then they have to be corrected,” German economy minister Peter Altmaier said. “That isn’t about fingerpointing — it’s about improvements for the future.”
German interior minister Horst Seehofer rejected criticism the government had failed to warn people of last week’s floods. “It would be completely inconceivable for such a catastrophe to be managed centrally from any one place,” Seehofer he told journalists on Monday. “You need local knowledge.”