Climate Scientists Stunned By Scale Of European Flooding; German Deaths Top 100, 1,300 Missing
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Precipitation records were smashed across a wide area of the Rhine basin on Wednesday, with devastating consequences. At least 58 people have been killed, tens of thousands of homes flooded and power supplies disrupted. Parts of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia were inundated with 148 litres of rain per sq metre within 48 hours in a part of Germany that usually sees about 80 litres in the whole of July. The city of Hagen declared a state of emergency after the Volme burst its banks and its waters rose to levels not seen more than four times a century. The most striking of more than a dozen records was set at the Köln-Stammheim station, which was deluged in 154mm of rain over 24 hours, obliterating the city’s previous daily rainfall high of 95mm.
Climate scientists have long predicted that human emissions would cause more floods, heatwaves, droughts, storms and other forms of extreme weather, but the latest spikes have surpassed many expectations. “I am surprised by how far it is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
Gerten, who grew up in a village in the affected area, said it occasionally flooded, but not like this week. Previous summer downpours have been as heavy, but have hit a smaller area, and previous winter storms have not raised rivers to such dangerous levels. “This week’s event is totally untypical for that region. It lasted a long time and affected a wide area,” he said.
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Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, said so many records were being set in the US this summer that they no longer made the news: “The extremes that would have been newsworthy a couple of years ago aren’t, because they pale in comparison to the astonishing rises a few weeks ago.” This was happening in other countries too, he said, though with less media attention. “The US is often in the spotlight, but we have also seen extraordinary heat events in northern Europe and Siberia. This is not a localised freak event, it is definitely part of a coherent global pattern.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/16/climate-scientists-shocked-by-scale-of-floods-in-germany
The death toll from catastrophic floods in western Germany and Belgium has risen to more than 100, local authorities have said, as emergency services continued their search for hundreds still missing. “I fear that we will only see the full extent of the disaster in the coming days,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said from Washington late on Thursday, calling it a day “characterised by fear, by despair, by suffering”.
Authorities in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said 50 people had died there, including at least nine residents of an assisted living facility for people with disabilities, while neighbouring North Rhine-Westphalia put the death toll at 43.
Officials warned the figures could rise further. About 1,300 people in the devastated Ahrweiler district of Rhineland-Palatinate remain unaccounted for, although efforts to contact them were being hindered by badly damaged phone networks.
The regional interior minister, Roger Lewentz, told broadcaster SWR that “40, 50 or 60 people could be missing. When you haven’t heard for people for such a long time … you have to fear the worst. The number of victims will likely keep rising.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/16/western-germany-floods-angela-merkel-horror-catastrophe-deaths-missing-search-flooding-belgium
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