The life and death of Rosa Reichel: the brilliant girl who was swept away
It was not a river. It was scarcely a stream. The Ruisseau des Quartes, Marcourt, Belgium. An unlovely and unremarkable tributary of the Ourthe, itself a tributary of the mighty Meuse, which thunders from France through Belgium and the Netherlands and on to the chilly oblivion of the North Sea. It was barely 2 metres wide, boggy in places, just 5cm deep in others. The parents dropping off their children at the United World Colleges summer camp on 10 July 2021 hopped over it as they lugged bags to the dormitories.
Fourteen-year-old Benjamin Van Bunderen Robberechts was nervous on the drive down. He would have to take a Covid test on arrival and he worried it would be positive. Belgium was beginning to relax restrictions and Benjamin was desperate to socialise with other teenagers. But the test was negative; soon, Benjamin was dropping off his things in his dorm and meeting his other campmates. And there was Rosa.
Rosa Reichel was 15, from Denmark and Germany by way of New York, but her family lived in Brussels. Dyed red hair and black eyeliner and chunky silver necklaces. She tapped Benjamin on the shoulder and told him a dirty joke. Just like that, they were friends.
The girl Benjamin met that day laughed a lot: loudly, happily. If you gathered Rosa’s friends in a room and asked them to describe one thing about Rosa, without question it would be her laugh. If you gave them more words, her friends would say how much fun she was, but also how caring: how Rosa was always the person who noticed when people were feeling low and tried to cheer them up. They felt that she was someone you could rely on, someone who brightened any room she was in. She stood up for her friends and for causes she believed in. At first, she might have been a little shy around you, but when she opened up, she would share her humour, her values, herself.
Benjamin was a little overwhelmed by her. “She was the greatest person I ever met,” he says.
The rain was hammering down on Wednesday 14 July. During their morning workshops, Benjamin and Rosa exchanged looks, as if to say: this is stupid. The teenagers played ping pong and grouched about the food. By the afternoon, they were getting restless. A few, including Rosa, decided to go for a run in the rain.
“How was the run?” Benjamin asked when she returned. “Wet,” she said.
There were no adults around, but other children were outside. It was raining, but it didn’t feel dangerous. Benjamin and Rosa went outside, stood on a bridge over the stream and watched the water. The ground was muddy. Rosa slipped. Benjamin caught her before she fell. “The last thing she said to me was: ‘Benjamin, what would I do without you?’”
Seconds later, the fields flooded with a terrifying rush of water. Rosa was dragged away. Benjamin jumped in after her. He caught her and grabbed at branches with his free arm. He remembers seeing his sandals float away, one after another. There was a fence pole sticking out of the bank. He lunged at it, still holding Rosa with his other arm. “But then a bigger wave came and she slipped out of my hands.”
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Across Wallonia, the primarily French-speaking region in the south of Belgium, the rain hammered all through 13 July. In the worst-affected areas, between 200mm and 300mm fell in only 72 hours. Members of the European Flood Awareness System in the UK had sent warnings to the Belgian authorities on 12 July, but it appears these were not sufficiently heeded.
The catastrophe unfolded on the morning of 14 July. In the city of Liège – once at the centre of the Industrial Revolution, a place where coal was mined and iron was forged and copper was refined, for export via the Meuse all around the world – members of the city council attended a Bastille Day ceremony in honour of the French resistance at the Parc d’Avroy. Senior figures kept taking phone calls and stepping away. The military commander of the province excused himself.
Seven miles away, in Trooz, a humdrum deindustrialised town with 8,500 inhabitants, the River Vesdre burst its banks at noon. It rose 6 metres in total. The mayor, Fabien Beltran, had been up all night trying to deal with a mudslide on the outskirts of the city. His wife was in hospital with a brain aneurysm; this was the last thing he needed.
The city’s communications servers were housed in a basement in the town hall, which flooded within an hour. By 1.30pm, all the roads were impassable. When Beltran’s phone got a signal, which was seldom, it buzzed incessantly with panicked calls from residents. They were standing on their kitchen tables, with the water up to their waist. Beltran called the army, who told him help was on its way. Eight hours later, a few soldiers arrived with small dinghies. Beltran had 2,200 people who needed to be moved to safety. It was impossible. Parents were on rooftops with their children; they weren’t sure whether to jump into the water. Beltran had no one to send them. It was the worst moment of his life.
Upstream, in Eupen, the Vesdre dam was straining. In normal times, it holds 25m cubic metres of water, but after the heavy rainfall it was cradling an extra 13.4m cubic metres. If it burst, 38.4m cubic metres would barrel through the Vesdre valley towns of Limbourg, Verviers, Pepinster, Trooz and Chaudfontaine. On the evening of 14 July, a decision was made to release water. It flowed into the Vesdre initially at a rate of 5 cubic metres a second, which gradually increased until it rushed through at 150 cubic metres a second. On 15 July, just after midnight, seismometers shuddered with the roar of a flash flood.
It thundered along the Vesdre, then into the Ourthe and the Meuse. It pulverised bridges, roads, warehouses, lorries, factories, cars and shops. Buildings were torn in half like loaves of bread. Bridges crumpled like cans in a recycling bin. The water carried metrelong blocks of butter, now foul-smelling and contaminated with oil, and chocolate moulds from the Galler factory in Chaudfontaine.
The next day, 15 July, dawned cold and wet. In Liège, Dolhain and Eupen, the mayors evacuated the cities, amid fears a dam near Liège would break. But in Trooz and Pepinster, it was too late for that: people were already trapped. Members of a jetski club offered Beltran their services. If they drowned, he could be liable for their deaths. But there were children on roofs, so he said yes.At great personal risk, the jetskiers rescued people. But not everyone could be saved.
In Trooz, a 20-year-old man died trying to cross the road. Two elderly people had heart attacks. In Liège, two people drowned in their houses. In all, 39 people died in Belgium before the waters receded.
On the morning of 15 July, an alert flashed on the mobile phones of people in the affected areas. “Be alert,” it read. “Flooding on the banks of the Meuse. Evacuate if possible, or take shelter upstairs.”
***
It took three days for rescuers to find Rosa’s body four miles downstream. Benjamin tried to be hopeful, to think that maybe she was sitting in a tree, but he knew in his heart that she was dead. “The water was a monster,” he says.
For months, he barely left his bedroom. He tried going to school, but on his first day back someone asked him how his summer was and it broke him. He avoided looking at bodies of water.