A kindNatoli Neugebauer stands just 100 meters from his home, on the edge of the Blessem district in the commuter town of Erftstadt, 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cologne. Although the flooding of the Eft River began to recede at noon on Friday, he still had to wade through waist-high brown water to enter the whitewashed townhouse.
“It’s totally indescribable,” said the 40-year-old Neugebauer. “A disaster.”
“I was there twice yesterday trying to save what I could do. But you opened the door and the water reached your chest. You just want to know, why should I do this? It’s all ruined.”
As the river started to flood, Neugebauer was one of 1,905 village residents evacuated on Thursday After record rainfall.
The familiar landscape turned into a sinister terrain: a gravel quarry south of Blytheham, 40 hectares (99 acres) wide and 60 meters deep, quickly filled with water, and the edges expanded towards the town through forward erosion, engulfing several vehicles Cars, three half-timbered buildings and part of the castle.
Local authorities are still looking for 15 people they believe were in the house. “We assume there will be a death toll, but we are not sure,” said Herbert Ruhr, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.
A near-stable low-pressure weather system brought record rainfall to the Rhein-Erft-Kreis region around 9pm on Wednesday, initially flooding fields and farms.
Hay and vegetable fields that had withered in years of drought a few weeks ago were suddenly filled with stagnant water. The basements, ground-floor houses and apartments in the farming area began to be flooded.
“For a while we thought we had to evacuate our 200 animals,” said the farmer Peter Zens, who runs the Gertrudenhof petting zoo in Hürth, between Erftstadt and Cologne. “But we spent 18 hours pumping water all night, and finally we were lucky to escape.”
But as Zens managed to drain his farm, the water in the rivers, creeks, and streams that passed through the area began to rise. “We have the Rotbach creek here, which often dries up in summer,” Zens said. “Now it is a frothy stream like the Rhine.”
When the river burst its banks the next day, it still surprised many people in Erftstadt.
“We often ride our bikes through town and watch the river get higher and higher,” Neugbauer said. “We waited as long as we could, but when we saw the truck on Luxemburger Strasse underwater, we packed up the car and the children and went to a family in the next town.”
Luxembourg Street is the main road connecting Erftstadt and Cologne. Water seemed to rush in without any warning, trapping trucks and cars, and throwing vehicles against the parapets and the crumbling walls of the entrance ramp. A part of the A1 highway outside the town collapsed and collapsed in Erft.
Neugebauer said they left before receiving any official evacuation orders. Officials said many other people in the town did not heed the warning and left. The police said they used boats to rescue about 50 people from their homes.
Storms and floods are nothing new in Rhein-Erft-Kreis. The area is dotted with open-pit mines that have historically been used to mine brown coal, gravel or sand.
When the owners of the Blessem gravel quarry applied for an expansion in 2015, the local authorities agreed to their request on the condition that they would build a 1.2 km protective wall to prevent water from accumulating in the pit in the event of a flood.
But extreme weather events in the world See more and more frequently Bring unpredictable consequences. The protective wall between the gravel pit and Erft proved to be ineffective, as water overflowed from the upper reaches of the river, gushing out on the streets of the town, and then collected at the lowest point.
Matthias Habel is a geographer in Bonn. He is studying flood protection measures in the area as part of his degree. He said that for those familiar with the local conditions, the flood caused The catastrophic consequences will not come as a surprise.
“The place where the Erft River passes through Erftstadt is no longer a natural flowing river, but more like an artificially straightened canal,” Hubbel told the Guardian. “The water flow here is much faster than elsewhere, and there is a lack of natural floodplains that can cope with overflow.”
On Friday afternoon, the town was almost empty, only soldiers tried in vain to stop the onlookers.
At the end of Frauentaler Strasse, usually 100 meters from Erft, a red brick building lacks a ground floor, and the walls hang precariously above the flood.
The water is oily, and the air smells of gas. Temporary potting soil and sandbox sand did not stop the flood from seeping out: water marks on the old brick house indicated that it was at least one meter high.
People from nearby villages came to check on their neighbors. “This is absolutely shocking,” a young couple said. “We drive past here every day, which is different from anything we have seen.”
