MeterArcel Wahl has just arrived in Leverkusen with his soldiers. The sky was cloudy, at least it didn’t rain. But this does not mean a lot. This Friday afternoon, the staff sergeant looked at BayArena while on the phone. Behind it are the Durn and Rhine rivers. Both are so swollen, like Wupper that can be heard in the city. The soil of Bergisches Land was absorbed like a sponge, the dams of Sauerland and Eifel were flooded and the dams became unstable. Val and his comrades do not yet know where they will be deployed. But the defensive battle against water is imminent.
20,000 sandbags are waiting to be distributed at key points. Maybe there will be more. Civil forces are overwhelmed by this.This is why after the city Armed forces call. The 21st Armored Brigade issued an alert to soldiers from the supply battalion in Unna and the reconnaissance battalion in Allen. A total of two hundred soldiers participated in the parade. But not everyone can pass. The Leverkusen highway intersection was closed at this time. Wall is one of them, the Allen couple, and they did it early. However, according to Var, the soldiers from Unna were still trapped.
Leverkusen is just the latest focus of the deployment of the Bundeswehr in North Rhine-Westphalia this Friday afternoon. But it is far from the only one. So far, of the 17 requests for assistance accepted by the armed forces, only 5 have been completed. Constantly adding new ones. A spokesperson for the State Command in Düsseldorf said that 555 soldiers are currently deployed. But this number is obviously just a water level. To be exact, it was said by the commanding community, I don’t know. Cities and municipalities are often called the Bundeswehr. The soldiers sent an advance team to see what they could do, and then they would take action. “Paper love” will be discussed later.
People are being rescued from destroyed houses
According to the state headquarters of North Rhine-Westphalia, when deploying the Bundeswehr, the focus of the force remains on rescue measures, immediate prevention of damage and the basic options for restoring civilian operations.
The search and rescue helicopter continued to carry people from the tree tops and wash the houses. Waterproof barriers will be erected and roads repaired so that fire brigades, ambulances, technical rescue organizations and most importantly local residents can re-enter the restricted water zone. Just like in Hagen. In view of the heavy rain and the devastation caused by the Worm River, the city at the foot of Sauerland was the first to ask the Bundeswehr for help on Wednesday.
On Wednesday night, soldiers from the 130th Armored Pioneer Battalion in Minden still marched towards Songden with heavy equipment; it turns out that the Blazers’ military skills are in place to combat destruction. In combat, one of their tasks is to cut off passages, overcome obstacles and cross water bodies. On Friday, in Hagen, the Blazers pulled a real shipping container out of the water. A 20-foot container was stuck on the bridge. The buffalo-type recovery tank with crane system and the Dachs-type pioneer tank with excavator system must be used together to recover the container.
In addition to the tank pioneers, soldiers from the 21st Armored Brigade were also deployed in Hagen. One of them is Captain Martin Walter Matt. The press officer reviewed five overseas missions in Kosovo and Mali, and was still shocked by the extent of the damage on the phone the day after he returned from Hagen. He will never forget a street in the Horn Limburg district. “As I walked through the rubble, I saw something white sticking out of the ground. It was a car roof.” He couldn’t forget the scene. “There are tons of rubble and rubble,” he said. “A lot of people have lost everything, almost everything, right in the middle of Germany.”
“The priority now is disaster relief”
The soldiers of the Bundeswehr must be prepared for the fact that in addition to the flooding consequences of the corona pandemic, they must also deal with another internal deployment within a long period of time. Secretary of Defense Annegrett Kramp-Karenbauer (CDU) ordered on Friday that the Bundeswehr should postpone all orders not directly related to overseas missions. “The first task of the Bundeswehr is disaster relief,” the minister wrote on Twitter. Judging from their experience in the corona pandemic, according to the Bundeswehr circle, there is at least one benefit. In the fight against the virus, the interaction between civilian and armed forces has been “established.”
