Poor, poor Germany

MerylStreep

Callistemon
A friend of mine was born the night that Canvey Island flooded. The water started to come over the bedroom windowsill minutes after she was born.

I wonder if her story featured in the newspapers?

I do remember this and remember my mother getting very upset about so many stories.
www.canveyisland.org/history-2/floods/flood-photos/miracle-baby-photo

A housing development, in my village, was built right up to the edge of a river. The locals protested that the fields in that area flooded ever winter, hence the farmer never left any livestock in those fields. Many historic photographs were provided to prove the point. But the council decided that it wouldn't happen and a developer moved in and built 36 homes at £500,000 each. First winter, every single house was flooded to one degree or another. So they dug up another field and built underground storage tanks that would drain off the surface flood water - in theory. But it didn't stop the underground flooding and gardens, paths and roads continue to crack and crumble under the weight of the water. Every one of those houses is struggling to get house insurance "because they're on a flood plain". Well! Who knew!

Floods in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and severe drought in Madagascar:
www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/climate-crisis-madagascar-drought-worsens-77964

It appears that not everyone took it that seriously ?
Certainly not this would be next chancellor.
www.smh.com.au/world/europe/frontrunner-to-succeed-merkel-sorry-for-laughing-scene-in-visit-to-fatal-floods-20210718-p58arz.html

Apparently warnings were sent out last weekend. The following is from the BBC NEws website:

"Amid the despair and the mounting death toll in Germany and Belgium are questions about how such a disaster could have happened.

The flooding followed record rainfall in parts of western Europe that caused rivers to burst their banks.

Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist who set up and now advises the European Flood Awareness System - an EU programme designed to provide early warnings of dangerous floods - said alerts were sent to authorities in Europe over the weekend.

"There were alerts going out... saying there's some very serious rain and floods coming: be aware. It's then for the national authorities to take that information and go with it," she said.

Prof Cloke said there were places where the system had "done what it's designed to do", with early warnings heeded.

But there were "also places where those warnings did not get through to the people and they did not know it was going to happen".

Prof Cloke set up the warning system after deadly flooding in Europe in 2002, hoping to prevent such an event from happening again.

But she said the latest flooding had exposed "breaks in the chain". "

I read this morning that relatively few people had signed up to flood warnings and that some of the "alarm" systems were malfunctioning when tested.

When we bought our house in Woodbridge, Suffolk in 2006 one of the searches done automatically was for flooding because we were fairly close to the river. The result was that the area where we bought was not subject to flooding. The river did burst its banks, especially when there were spring tides combined with wind and rain. The only things to suffer were the yacht club and the boating pond.

When such a volume of water falls in two days areas that are considered not subject to flooding can become overrun by water. Water is so powerful. With our climate changing, we see unheard-of weather in many, if not all, countries.

Yes, poor Germany-
It seems the first signs of catastrophe were detected nine days ago by a satellite orbiting 500 miles above the hills around the Rhine river. Over the next few days a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by “extreme” flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena.
Yet despite at least 24 hours’ warning that predicted, almost precisely, which districts would be worst afflicted when the rains came, the flood still caught many of its victims largely unawares.

The German government is now facing questions about how many lives might have been saved had it evacuated the danger zones in time and properly conveyed the gravity of the impending crisis to the public. As Bild, the country’s bestselling newspaper, put it: “Did our disaster protection agency fail?”

At best shambolic - at worst criminal.

Many regions in the UK are very vulnerable, especially those that were 'stolen' from the sea a long time ago, like parts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. But for the grace of God.