Heavy rains are causing floods in northern Europe

At least 33 people have died and many are missing in Germany’s catastrophic floods over the past few years of heavy rains that senior politicians have linked to climate change.

Twenty people have died in the city of Cologne on the Rhine and surrounding, the two drowning in their floodwaters.

Rivers broke in their banks in large parts of western Germany and swept away standing houses. Several towns, including Altena near Wuppertal, were cut off from the world, railway services were disrupted and telephone distribution was disrupted throughout the region. Rhine hospitals in the towns of Leverkusen and Eschweiler were evacuated.

Other countries also experienced floods. In Belgium, two men have died in torrential rains and a 15-year-old girl is reported missing after being swept away by a flood. At least a dozen houses collapsed in Pepinster after the Vesdre River collapsed, and people were evacuated from more than 1,000 homes.

Climate experts point to the extreme weather – “Bernd” – which brought the hot, humid Mediterranean winds to the north and east of Germany and intermarried with two high-altitude hurdles that prevented it from continuing.

“In the past two days some areas have recorded more than 200 liters of rain per meter,” said Mark Eisenmann, German weather forecaster for ARD TV. “Too much [of rain] it was accomplished which has never happened before. And the results were dramatic. ”

He also said the amount of rainfall was so great “that it was no longer fixed by rivers [or] soil ”.

German TV news showed the devastation, the town’s dormitory was littered with the rubble of demolished houses, the trees were torn down by trees and overturned. Helicopters were shown carrying people to protect themselves from trees and their homes as floodwaters surrounded them.

Five people have died and many are missing inside and around Ahrweiler, in the western part of the Rhineland-Palatinate. Heavy rains there turned the Ahr River, which flows into the Rhine, into a torrent that destroyed at least 100 homes and flooded and destroyed 10 schools. overflowing.

Angela Merkel, the chancellor, who is in the US to interview Joe Biden, wrote that she was “shocked by the tragedy that so many people experienced in the floods”. He also expressed his condolences to those affected by their families and families and thanked the “tireless” emergency services “from the bottom of my heart”.

“There are dead people, there are missing people, there are still many who are still at risk,” said Malu Dreyer, Rhineland-Palatinate state ambassador. It’s very painful. ”

By lunchtime on Thursday 33 people had been pronounced dead and many were still missing. In the city of Cologne, two people were found dead in their flooded area.

Armin Laschet, governor of North Rhine-Westphalia and a successor to Merkel as chancellor, linked floods with climate change.

“We are experiencing such situations over and over again, and that means we need to accelerate climate protection efforts – in Europe, the federation and around the world, because climate change is not limited to one state,” he said in a visit to Hagen, one of the victims. and flooding.