Dozens killed in flooding caused by rainfall 'not seen in 100 years' in Europe

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/europe/gallery/flooding-western-europe/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/europe/germany-deaths-severe-flooding-intl/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/15/germany-flooding-buildings-collapse/

We have a few longtime members here from those parts.\

Speak up folks, please.

In the Czech Republic we're currently seeing all kinds of horrendous weather coming over from "thataway" but it's depleted, nothing like the volumes those guys have already experienced.

Fortunately not where I live, but my my sister lives in Geilenkirchen, her husband is working as a firefighter on Geilenkirchen AFB; where the AWACS planes are stationed. It hit them not that hard, but she sent pretty impressive photos of flooded streets. No harm to her house thankfully.

Greets

Karsten

Continue pray for everyone's safety

I have a friend who lives in Bochum who has been assisting with the relief efforts there.

How can we help the European flood victims? I went to American Red Cross and International Red Cross and didn't see any collecting money and aide for them. But plenty of money and aide fundraising for American disasters.

This is just more and more horrible with each new report

Well, that would be me.

I work for the THW (Technisches Hilfswerk) the official English name is "Federal Agency for Technical Relief". The huge bulk of it's members are volunteers (roughly 80000) way less are working for the THW in a job position. I do both though, as I am also a volunteer member of a branch in my area.

https://www.bmi.bund.de/EN/topics/civil-protection/thw/thw.html

https://www.thw.de/EN/Homepage/homepage_node.html

As you can imagine the THW was alerted quickly once the problems started in the night from tuesday to wednesday, also the situation was partially anticipated due to the weather forecast.

However, most of us didn't anticipate it would get this bad.

At first my area was hit pretty nasty, with sections of the city of Hagen getting flooded. Later on the monsoo... sorry, the rain struck the hilly area to the south-east from here, and the main hotspot with the most problems there was the town of Altena.

You have to imagine Altena as a town located between pretty steep slopes covered with trees and stretched out along the valley of a river called Lenne. The houses are located usually close to the river as well. If you imagine a setting in West Virginia or maybe Vermont, you are probably not too far off. The most remarkable building is the castle on a hill section, which can easily be imagined as "Castle Wolfenstein", but is a Youth Hostel and museum now.

Part of my job within the last days was to drive to Altena in the night and/or morning to provide supplies.

The lower sections of the town has been badly flooded, with not just the river Lenne rising, but several ravines flowing down the hills, taking away soil with them, also landslides happened. Some sections of the roads are badly damaged with the tarmac gone, some roads close to the Lenne also lost sections which fell into the river. Lots of damage to houses too, and the entire scenery has to be imagined in the color of umber. Of course, the color umber doesn't mean in this case that the mud cover on everything is merely pure earth: as you can imagine the sewer system got flooded too...

No images from me from there, as I had a job to do, a time schedule to keep up and I also didn't want to make images, as I am not a "disaster tourist". There are enough images already to be found on the web.


So, it looks bad, yes.


But despite losses of life which happened there (two firefighters), the events in Hagen and Altena are still really mild compared to the damage in the Rhineland in places like Erftstadt-Blessem (the first two images by NoFlyBoy show before and after), Ahrweiler, the village of Schuld, Bad Münstereifel, and several other places there! Entire houses were destroyed by the floods, some houses literally tumbled into a crater.

The Nurbürgring has been declared a mobilisation area, with firefighters, Red Cross and other rescue services, police and the THW being temporarily stationed there and deployed to the sites where they are needed. Also many civilians and civilian companies with access to lorries, excavators, tractors, etc. have volunteered to help and get involved in cleaning up the mess.

In certain areas the water came so quickly, people got surprised and trapped, with quite a lot of them drowning. So it always has to be expected you will find bodies when you clean up. Other people ignored warnings to flee immediately and paid the ultimate price.

Just in Germany alone the known death toll is around 160 and rising, making it the worst natural disaster having struck Germany in decades. And if you take the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg into account as well, the picture gets much worse.

Btw, talking about "much worse": today it started to heavily rain in Southern Bavaria. Berchtesgaden and other locations very badly flooded. Austria is also heavily affected now.

Also in some areas it is advised not to drink the tap water anymore. Usually our tap water is fine, but currently in certain areas it cannot be guaranteed, that it doesn't contain harmful germs and possibly dangerous substances from the chemical industry.

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Take note I do not take into account temporal and mild floodings in dozens of locations, including mine.

Frankly, a cellar flooded with a few inches of water, as it happened in the basement of the house where I live in, is anything but an emergency. When I saw the images of this in the WhatsApp-group containing other tenants of the house I live in I merely smirked. This is nothing really. Furthermore it is not the first and will not have been the last time the cellar gets flooded after heavy rain, and I never stored anything valuable in it anyway since I moved in here.

It's very noble of you to risk your life and give your time to help others, Purolator. I can't imagine what you have to see and experience every day.

Stay safe.

Thanks NoFlyBoy, but admittedly there is not that much nobility involved if it is simply part of your job, as I genuinely work for the THW and are additionally a volunteer.

What I did here was not on volunteer basis though, it really was part of my job to keep the troops supplied. But to me this part of the job felt indeed very useful.

The risk was and is of course kept as minimised as possible, and this is valid for us all. The biggest one taken by me was merely speeding with up to 170km/h over a slightly wet Autobahn to keep my time schedule, as I had to supply two sites on this trip.

OMG, there will thousands of dead by time they find them all. Unreal.

Thanks for those posts purolator. It really shed a personal light on this tragedy.

How do you start over? Where do you begin?