Germany: Devastating floods raise fears for future
Entire towns in western Germany were devastated last week by “the flood of the century,” said Susanne Scholz in Express, and the whole country is in shock. The images on TV news looked like they were coming from a tropical monsoon zone, not our first-world nation. Never did we think we would see our own citizens “trapped in houses on the verge of collapse, in danger of being swept away by masses of water.” Days of torrential rain caused rivers to burst their banks in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine–Westphalia, and in neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands. In the small town of Sinzig, the River Ahr crested at about 23 feet, flooding a nursing home and drowning 12 disabled residents who could not flee. Authorities have so far confirmed some 200 deaths across Germany, but hundreds more people remain missing. While authorities say it’s too early to put a price tag on the damage, the images of submerged homes and electrical stations, obliterated bridges, and cars crumpled by fallen trees tell a tale of vast material loss. “The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been wrought,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel. She praised the thousands of volunteers who came to bail water, load sandbags, and search for survivors.
“Disaster control clearly failed,” said Peter Tiede in Bild. State and local authorities responsible for evacuation warnings relied on smartphone apps that many Germans don’t have—and service was out anyway because the storms had downed the cell towers. Only old-fashioned sirens work in such emergencies, yet our few loudspeaker vans never left the depots. Public radio, meanwhile, “was playing pop music while hundreds of people were being washed away, houses collapsing, villages razed to the ground.” It’s simply inexcusable. “How bad will it get when such a flood hits a major city like Cologne or Hamburg instead of villages and small towns?”
That’s the question on everyone’s mind as the September elections approach, said Dieter Löffler in Südkurier. Which party, the ruling center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) or the leftist Greens, do voters trust to protect them? The CDU leads in polls, with 29 percent to the Greens’ 19 percent, but the floods could change that. Merkel’s successor as party leader, North Rhine–Westphalia Gov. Armin Laschet, has previously championed “climate-killer lignite mines,” and this week he was caught on camera laughing during a visit to the flood-ravaged town of Erftstadt. Is his newfound climate evangelism credible? For the Greens, led by Annalena Baerbock, climate is the “core issue,” but can they govern and cut emissions without bankrupting the country? What is clear is that climate change is no longer some distant phenomenon—it is now our “experienced reality,” said Konrad Schuller in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. We are living in a “new normal” of searing heat waves and catastrophic floods in which climate–related deaths will also become normal, “sometimes a few hundred as with the current floods, sometimes many thousands.”