“The warning time was far too short.” Many have asked why the emergency systems designed to warn people of impending disaster didn’t work as the death toll from floods in Germany and neighboring countries passes 210 and almost 150 people remain missing.
Workers use heavy machines to tear down a damaged bridge in the flood-hit town of Ahrweiler, Germany, on Friday, July 23, 2021. With the death toll and economic damage from last week’s floods in Germany continuing to rise, questions have been raised about why systems designed to warn people of the impending disaster didn’t work.
Sirens in some towns failed when the electricity was cut. In other locations, there were no sirens at all; volunteer firefighters had to knock on people’s doors to tell them what to do. The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that in one suburb of Wuppertal, north of Cologne, people were warned by a monk ringing a bell.
German authorities did receive early warnings from the European Flood Awareness System. These made their way through official channels, putting firefighters on heightened alert as well as smartphone users who had installed disaster warning apps, but such apps aren’t widely used. “People are looking at a life in ruins here. Some have lost relatives, there were many dead,” said Thomas Linnertz, the state official now coordinating the disaster response. “I can understand the anger very well. But on the other hand, I have to say again: This was an event that nobody could have predicted.”The head of Germany’s federal disaster agency BKK, Armin Schuster, acknowledged to public broadcaster ARD that “things didn’t work as well as they could have.
Despite a heavy flood in 2016, nobody had expected the waters of the Ahr River to rise as high as they did in his community, Lemke said.
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