Floods in Germany and Belgium

[kato]

Germany is currently experiencing heavy flooding in two western states; Eastern Belgium is also heavily affected.
Reason for the floods is heavy rainfall at levels exceeding any in the area in the last 100 years.

So far there have been 59 deaths in Germany and 20 in Belgium; in one German county alone 1,300 people are missing. About 10,000 people in Germany have been evacuated; Belgium is currently evacuating central Liege - a city with 200,000 people - and the Netherlands are evacuating 10,000 from Maastricht.

Along some smaller rivers virtually all bridges have been destroyed. Railway routes and highways between the Ruhr area and Brussels as well as to South Germany are interrupted. In multiple places dams have broken, leading to influx of water into usually dry areas - as an example the Inden strip mine has been flooded. In other places dams are expected to break tonight as water masses arrive from higher up.
South Germany is expecting storms with heavy rainfall this morning (even if i don't see a single cloud right now), which will push further water into the now flooded areas in the next 2-3 days.

Germany on thursday according to the Federal Ministry of the Interior deployed nearly 15,000 civil protection forces in the area, including 2,100 from the federal technical assistance corps and 850 military (mostly an engineer battalion stationed nearby). The Dutch Army is also deploying "several hundred" men. France, Austria and Italy have deployed units in support in Belgium, coordinated by the EU. In one town in Germany where isolated looting has been reported a police company has been deployed additionally.

 

[OPSSG]

Wow, unexpectedly serious developments from floods in Germany and Belgium.

Even the Luxembourg government has set up a crisis cell to respond to emergencies triggered by heavy rains overnight as Prime Minister Xavier Bettel reported "several homes" had been flooded and were "no longer inhabitable".

Thank you @kato, for the HADR update.

 

[ngatimozart]

Definitely not good. It's something we have experience of here more times than we like. 100 year floods occur with monotonous regularity and usually in the same location. We have an ongoing one on the West Coast of the South Island at the moment. They measure their annual rainfall in metres and 5 or 6 metres is not uncommon. Australia's had some bad floods recently especially in New South Wales. The only good thing to come out of them was that they broke a 7+year drought.

It's sad to hear of the deaths in Germany and Belgium, as well as the high number of missing. Hopefully those missing will be found alive. @kato hope you and yours manage to stay dry and safe.

 

[kato]

100 year floods occur with monotonous regularity and usually in the same location.

In areas mapped out for 100 year floods you are not allowed to erect new buildings in most German states. It's a bit moot though since that was only started in the last 10-20 years.
This flood now conforms and in some places exceeds what is mapped out for "HQ Extreme", i.e. floods occuring every 200-1000 years.

Wow, unexpectedly serious developments from floods in Germany and Belgium.

Germany tends to be "relatively prepared" for flood events since to a large extent our civil protection setup - military assistance, but also the far larger civilian HADR organizations - is laid out around exactly that kind of event. There are several dozen tactical water rescue platoons (specifically formed and equipped around that task) deployed right now for example, with dozens more moving in from other states.

 

[kato]

The Netherlands have abandoned evacuating four villages along the Juliana Canal - next to the border between Belgium and Netherlands west of Maastricht - due to the dike of the canal bursting. People remaining in the villages with a combined population of 6,000 are being told to shelter in place moving to upper floors of whatever building they're in immediately.

 

[swerve]

The pictures look terrifying, & the numbers are awful. Poor people.

In areas mapped out for 100 year floods you are not allowed to erect new buildings in most German states. It's a bit moot though since that was only started in the last 10-20 years.

That's something we could do with here in the UK. I remember work beginning on a site for offices next to the Thames near where I live which had to be stopped because of floods - & that was only a five or ten year flood. It was classified as land not to be built on by both the local government & the relevant central government ministry, but the council (in a special meeting with the council head absent) voted to set aside their own rules & approve it. Ministry officials stepped in to block it, but the minister overrode them.

The council head was a director of the firm which wanted to build on the land. He was a close friend of the local MP, who was the leader of a group of MPs which the government was desperate to have the support of. Corrupt? Just 100%.

Luckily, the builders went bankrupt, & the government changed. The building permit expired & was not renewed. New developers took over, with a plan which didn't build on the flood plain, all the buildings being set well back on higher ground.
Home - Thames Valley Park

But some years later, on the other side of town beside the River Kennet, there was a plan, also contrary to planning guidelines, to build on flood plain. The effective leader of our town council (he's officially deputy leader, but no. 1 comes & goes & he stays in place, pulling the strings) backed it to the hilt, & got the council to approve it. Fortunately, the ministry refused to even consider it. I'm pretty sure this bloke isn't corrupt in the sense of making money, but I think he loves to be part of big projects, & to have big businesses treat him as someone who they need to cooperate. Labour party, BTW. The other lot were all Conservatives.

The water behind them is covering some of the land that was earmarked for building.

The developers planned to build dykes round it. Among others, the owners of the biggest shopping centre in town (which the river flows through, with cafes & the like beside it) objected, since their experts reckoned that without the flood plain upriver the river would sometimes flood their shops.

We keep having to fight battles like this.

 

[ngatimozart]

@swerve Why doesn't that surprise me. Here it's more people built on the coast and now they are having their property damaged by storms and / or loosing property to coastal erosion. So a few years back the then government decided to introduce a set of regulations that stipulated that in defined coastal hazard zones there would be no more building of dwellings or businesses allowed and that when an existing structure within a coastal hazard zone was no longer fit for use it could not be replaced on the site. Well that bought an absolute storm of protest from all of those propertyowners affected, or thought that they would be affected, or just wanted to have a whinge. So the government quietly forgot about it.

The real problem is that every time there is a storm, more damage occurs to the same properties so the owners demand that the local council builds seawalls to protect their properties. Plus each time they make an insurance claim that puts the rest of our insurance premiums up. Natural hazards insurance is getting more expensive in NZ every year because of floods, earthquakes, storms etc. Anyway seawalls don't work that well because all they do is move the problem further along the beach, and the waves generally undercut them eventually destroying them because they are always built at or above the high tide mark. They also are very expensive.

When determining the coastal hazard zones the climate record, wave climate, bathymetry, morphology of the sea floor leading up to the coast, tidal range, and tsunami threat is taken into account. Based on that an inundation height above mean sea level is calculated based on a storm surge from a very deep low arriving during a storm with hurricane force winds at the same time as a king tide and a locally generated tsunami. That's a worse case scenario and that's why its used. For future proofing you now have to factor in sea level rise.

The only real option is managed retreat to higher ground or further inland. My speciality was coastal geomorphology and there's a reason why you don't see coastal geomorphologists living down on the beach. We live either on high ground overlooking the beach or inland. I live inland because the hills here had bits falling off them during the Canterbury earthquakes.

 

[kato]

I remember work beginning on a site for offices next to the Thames near where I live which had to be stopped because of floods - & that was only a five or ten year flood. It was classified as land not to be built on by both the local government & the relevant central government ministry, but the council (in a special meeting with the council head absent) voted to set aside their own rules & approve it. Ministry officials stepped in to block it, but the minister overrode them.

I am fairly sure that my state outlawing building in HQ100 zones in 2013 was the very reason why the exact same year a couple local communities finally (after previously 20 years of back-and-forth!) decided to invest 34 million into renovating the small river that runs through them - reinforcing its dikes, digging its riverbed deeper, adding flood basins, merging it with a parallel canal and actually moving the river in some places.

That investment basically shifts most of the land the communities (with around 50,000 people) are built on beyond the HQ100 mark, thus allowing them to e.g. replace buildings or fill up empty lots within their builtup area. The original 1992 plans - for which some minor investment had been taken - were only for shifting the land from a 20- to a 50-year flood, which was the standard back then.

The pictures look terrifying, & the numbers are awful. Poor people.

There are a few particularly tragic cases, such as an assisted living home for mentally handicapped people in Sinzig which flooded to 3m height within minutes. The night guard managed to pull one person with him to the upper floor. One out of 13 living on the ground floor.

 

[John Fedup]

Floods and wild fires with increasing frequency, apparently the new normal it seems. Certainly a reason to support HADR kit for the military AND civilian sectors.

 

[kato]

Certainly a reason to support HADR kit for the military AND civilian sectors.

The HADR kit in Germany is entirely on the civilian side.

For scale, the prepared civilian HADR forces in my state roughly measure - for each million people - a regiment-level formation with five battalion-sized commands that contain standardized tactical platoons (each) for firefighting, infrastructure, water pumping, floods, hazardous substances, decontamination, field hospitals, water rescue, air rescue, special rescue (mountain/earthquake).

Outside of armoured engineer vehicles (which mostly served to drag heavy trucks out of the water before they could be swept away) the military did not deploy any assets that these civilian forces did not - and in the military this was adhoc use of their regular equipment; front-loaders from a logistics battalion, ambulances from a medical regiment, boats from an engineer battalion etc.

 

[kato]

The Nürbergring Formula One racetrack has been converted into a rallying ground and supply center for civilian assistance forces deployed in northern Rhineland-Palatinate:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1416381300739563520

Rhineland-Palatinate with 4,200 deployed men is the smaller, though harder-hit, of the two theatres in Germany, with 98 deaths and 671 injured in the district of Ahrweiler alone. The rescue effort in Ahrweiler with hundreds of missing has largely switched to recovery by now - they're now grounding all UAVs and switching to IR-equipped helicopters to find people there, with sector-combing by ground forces based on that data.

In neighboring Northrhine-Westfalia as of this afternoon 23,000 men were deployed.

 

[swerve]

...The real problem is that every time there is a storm, more damage occurs to the same properties so the owners demand that the local council builds seawalls to protect their properties. Plus each time they make an insurance claim that puts the rest of our insurance premiums up. Natural hazards insurance is getting more expensive in NZ every year because of floods, earthquakes, storms etc. Anyway seawalls don't work that well because all they do is move the problem further along the beach, and the waves generally undercut them eventually destroying them because they are always built at or above the high tide mark. They also are very expensive....

Yeah, we have that problem. Where local authorities have given up trying to protect parts of the coast because the cost was insupportable & as you say, it usually just moves the problem, there have been howls of protest, but policy has been hardening for a while now - good!

Some places are actually breaching seawalls & letting salt marshes reestablish themselves. Not only cheaper, but more stable, & relieves pressure on nearby stretches of coast. At last!

If only they'd do that for flood plain buildings.

 

[ngatimozart]

The Nürbergring Formula One racetrack has been converted into a rallying ground and supply center for civilian assistance forces deployed in northern Rhineland-Palatinate:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1416381300739563520

Rhineland-Palatinate with 4,200 deployed men is the smaller, though harder-hit, of the two theatres in Germany, with 98 deaths and 671 injured in the district of Ahrweiler alone. The rescue effort in Ahrweiler with hundreds of missing has largely switched to recovery by now - they're now grounding all UAVs and switching to IR-equipped helicopters to find people there, with sector-combing by ground forces based on that data.

In neighboring Northrhine-Westfalia as of this afternoon 23,000 men were deployed.

Has there been any further updates on the 1,300 people believed missing a couple of days ago? I noticed that the death toll has been rising which is to be expected.

 

[kato]

Has there been any further updates on the 1,300 people believed missing a couple of days ago? I noticed that the death toll has been rising which is to be expected.

They were corrected yesterday evening - upwards. Those 1,300 were initially estimated from the district of Ahrweiler alone. There are currently between 3,000 and 3,500 cases of people being reported as missing from that district. That high number is primarily due to communication networks being destroyed though - apparently you need to drive about 30 minutes up the hills right now to reliably get a signal in the region for cell phones.

By comparison the police has about 100 cases of individuals missing. That's mostly those who could not be found as casualties or survivors when their villages were combed and were not listed as evacuated either. Since they're basically going through the villages house-by-house these are somewhat more reliable numbers. The confirmed casualties in the district (dead and injured) rose by about 350 between friday and saturday. That's the ones they find during that house-to-house check.

Many of the others out of communication also likely fled the valley - there are thousands currently housed in emergency shelters and probably at least 10,000-20,000 who otherwise moved out of the area. The primary affected zone is the somewhat narrow valley of the Ahr river uphill of the district capital Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler. While the district capital itself was 80% flooded to about 1.0-1.5m height - and only one bridge survived the floodwave - the dozen small villages (of about 200 to 2000 people each) in the valley were literally swept. In that area they're only flying people in and out by helicopter right now, as they're otherwise inaccessible.

Angela Merkel will visit the Ahrweiler district with state minister-president Malu Dreyer on sunday. They'll visit the village of Schuld, which is in that area but has already been fully combed through. 13 out of 660 people in the village died.

The Ahr river valley was destroyed to similar extent as now in floods in 1804 (57 deaths) and 1910 (64 deaths).

 

[ngatimozart]

@kato Thank you. Schud featured on the TV news here. We hope that those who are still missing are found alive, however with time that hope will fail. We certainly hope that they are found in order to to bring some sense of closure for families and friends.

 

[kato]

Political side show, just to mention it:

Merkel's visit in Schuld has gone down relatively well with locals. Part of the reason for that is that she is considered earnest as unlike other politicians popping up in the disaster areas she will not be running as chancellor candidate in the federal election in two months. During a press conference in Schuld she also interrupted and scolded a journalist (of the rightwing tabloid Bild, explicitly calling her out on that) who was pushing aside a local resident, resulting in some applause.
The chancellor candidate of the CDU for that election, Armin Laschet, meanwhile was heavily criticized earlier this weekend when laughing about some joke in the background while federal president Steinmeier was holding a memorial speech for the dead.

Malu Dreyer (the minister-president of the state) visiting with Merkel also has not been criticized in any way from what i see, and the fact that she did go there actually was interpreted quite positively. Dreyer suffers from multiple sclerosis and where possible uses a wheelchair (or, in this case, a tricycle with an electric motor); she walked across rubble in Schuld supported by a bodyguard, when Merkel noticed she had problems when the ground got rougher she took her arm on the other side.

There is something of a disinformation campaign from interested (right-extremist) parties going on portraying a failure of politicians and the government in the flood crisis, with visits by politicians of course being exploited for this. RT is flanking this campaign.


The number of formally missing sought by police in Ahrweiler district has apparently dropped from 100 to 30 since yesterday. 18 of the 70 found are dead.

Casualty numbers may still rise in the context of cleanup. In neighboring Northrhine-Westfalia today five men almost died after they had gone in to clean the basement of a building that the firefighters had previously pumped out. When the firefighters had come back to the basement to retrieve hoses they had used in the pumping earlier they found that the basement was essentially filled with CO2 and the cleaning crew unconscious - since they were running diesel generators without ventilation in there.

 

[kato]

One week after the flood the number of dead in Ahrweiler district is 128 with 155 missing and considered likely dead (in the sense that the deputy head of the THW paramilitary assistance organization actually literally said it like that now - no wishy-washy BS, but a plain "we consider it unlikely to find any of them alive"). 766 people were injured.

About 42,000 people in the district were impacted be the floodwave with damage to buildings etc. About 10,000 of them are sitting in their homes without (tap) drinking water or electricity. Several thousand are also housed in emergency shelters. THW has installed mobile water treatment plants and found some sealed old wells for supply of the population. The problem in this regard is mostly that the floods damaged several sewage facilities along the Ahr river, contaminating the river water with chemicals and bacteria. Leaked oil tanks add to the problem. The water can technically be drunk if you boil it first.

Three villages in the valley are still considered somewhat inaccessible - this is mostly due to bridges being destroyed. The Bundeswehr has attempted to use armoured bridgelayers to connect these, however as these are too short they're now in the process of rebuilding the river shore to actually make the already laid-down bridge elements accessible. In one of these villages they're actually airlifting even drinking water for the people.
The Luftwaffe today did an overflight with an Open Skies A319 (i.e. usually used to count tanks in Russia) for high-resolution visual and IR imagery of access paths in the valley to coordinate required repairs. Previous military reconnaissance overflights included Tornados who were looking for survivors using IR sidescan sensors.

330 people were airlifted by helicopter from rooftops. Including two helicopters contributed by the military up to 36 helicopters supported the recovery efforts in the district concurrently.

There are thunderstorms and strong rainfall expected in the area for the coming weekend.

 

[kato]

The Copernicus Emergency Management Service was activated immediately after the flood. The case (EMSR517) can be found here for Germany. EMSR518 is the CEMS IMINT case for flooded areas in Belgium (Liege and Rochefort areas), EMSR520 for the Netherlands (Venlo only).

CEMS is a European Commission service using to delineate and grade damage to surface features using before and after image comparison. It uses the Copernicus network of dual-use IMINT satellites. The "after" imagery for the above three cases - i.e. sources tasked - includes images taken by satellites Sentinel-1A, Sentinel-1B, Sentinel-2A, Pleiades-1A, COSMO-Skymed (not mentioned which one) and from "outside sources" apparently for a few areas Canadian satellite RADARSAT-2 (images generally available to the public) as well as (for Ahrweiler, additionally) highres aerial imagery provided by German Aerospace Agency DLR.

The grading maps in the above links include statistical analysis in the overviews. About 4,300 buildings and about 180 km infrastructure in the concerned area of Ahrweiler district as the hardest-hit were found to be damaged to various degrees, including about 470 completely destroyed buildings. This includes buildings not flooded but otherwise damaged, such as during landslides following the event (there seems to be a group of five buildings in the district capital on a hill side where that happened for example).

The above linked case for Germany also includes similar analysis for flooded areas in Northrhine-Westfalia, other areas (on the Mosel and Kyll rivers) in Rhineland-Palatinate and for concurrently flooded Berchtesgarden in Bavaria.

 

[kato]

THW wrote an after-action report on the deployment which was made public due to a freedom of information request mid last year.

THW is the "Federal Agency for Technical Relief". They're the country's official HADR volunteer force focusing on providing support to firefighters and medical units in natural disasters and civil defense, with semi-paramilitary structures (organization-wise), standardized equipment sets and close to 80,000 members. THW only acts on request of other disaster response entities, including individual municipalities or districts, and its units are generally subordinated to these entities on a deployment.

For THW, the 2021 flood disaster was the largest deployment in their history, with 16,316 individual men and women deployed providing about 2.5 million manhours in close to 60,000 individual assistance missions over a course of 3.5 months. About half of the deployed personnel, two-thirds of tasks and a bit over half the service hours were provided by local THW chapters in the two affected state suborganizations, the rest was personnel brought in from the rest of the nation. All 668 local THW chapters nationwide provided personnel.

The after-action report spends about 50 pages retelling the initial chaos of the beginning situation from the perspective of the responsible theater staff of the area, then another 200 pages analyzing problems encountered by individual types of forces deployed.

Main challenges for THW in the situation were:

• Communication in the Ahr valley was dead. Base stations had switched to a fallback mode only enabling local digital radio communications; THW's own base with radio ground station in the area - OV Ahrweiler - was destroyed and abandoned; the area was a SATCOM exclusion zone (for Iridium) due to radiotelescopes, which wasn't known until two days later. There were units in alert state in other areas of the state beforehand, which were immediately redeployed as initial response forces. Due to the communications outage these were effectively sent into an unknown situation losing radio contact.
• Especially on the civilian "requester" side the command situation initially was chaotic, and there were plenty of instances where requesters did not use formal lines of communication or established procedures. In some cases they also forced procedures upon THW meant for other kind of disaster response forces, such as requiring certain numbers of troops to be held in a readiness state for additional response. This directly impacted THW due to the subordination. THW is therefore calling for basically being allowed to field its own operational lead in such disasters - which is a political decision being lobbied for at top level.
• THW discovered some internal deficiencies, in particular in the manning of its command and communications platoons. These platoons at that point of time had been recently reorganized, only got their new TOE two weeks prior and were severely undermanned or under-capable, and therefore in some cases had to be either amalgated or replaced by other command assets. Similarly, it was discovered that the platoon troops of tactical platoons were not sufficiently manned to work in shifts over longer periods; this is not an issue in regular operations, where they can be replaced by a "neighboring" platoon within half an hour or so, but is of course an issue when that platoon is deployed over several hundred km into an area where local platoons are already bound.
• While most THW personnel - 85% by surveys - felt sufficiently prepared for the situation based on their training, this was not the case with the (employed, not volunteer) staff level. This is partly due to administrative staff having a lack of connection to tactical structures, as well as a recent enlargement of employee numbers for which training capacity was not sufficient. For the overall force numbers were slightly down from previous deployments (91% at the Elbe flood in 2013), which is being blamed on some training being relegated to online courses in 2020/2021 due to Covid.
• THW has several "special" formations at state level which are used effectively for troop trials - testing out a concept for two or three years before rolling it out on a wider scale. The problem that occured was that the organization and capabilities of these formations were largely unknown outside of their own state organization, and hence they were largely underutilized or assigned to tasks different to their purpose. This is mostly a training issue at staff level, i.e. making sure such units are more widely known.
• Some minor deficiencies in equipment were found, although these mostly had to do with formations that had only been established in the last few years prior and were not sufficiently field-tested or fully equipped yet.
• The field camp at Nürburgring was fairly criticized among the deployed men and women for a variety of reasons; chief among these was that it was located an hour driving outside the disaster zone (unlike the about two dozen adhoc camps established earlier) and that it was far too large (hosting around 4000 people and requiring up to 450 operating personnel) with all the problems that come with that. In addition it was already being filled with troops while still being established, in some cases because tactical platoons omitted bringing their own internal capacity for longer operations (THW troops) or did not have such an embedded capability at all (firefighters).