More than 120 people have died in devastating floods in parts of West Germany and Belgium, officials said on Friday, as search and rescue operations continue with hundreds more still unaccounted for or in danger.
Officials in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said 60 people died there, including 12 residents of an assisted living facility for disabled people in the town of Sinzig, who were shocked by a sudden rush of water from the nearby river Ahr. . In neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia, state officials put the death toll at 43, but warned the figure could rise.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was “shocked” by the devastation caused by the floods and promised support to the families of those killed and cities and towns facing significant losses.
“In this hour of need, our country stands together,” Steinmeier said in a statement Friday afternoon. “It is important that we show solidarity for those from whom the floods have taken everything away.”
Rescuers arrived on Friday to help those trapped in their homes in the city of Erfstadt, southwest of Cologne. Regional officials said several people died after their houses collapsed when the ground beneath them suddenly collapsed. Aerial photographs showed what appeared to be a giant sinkhole.
An armored engineer vehicle from the German Army picks up a damaged car during a clean-up operation for severe storm damage (AP Photo)
“We managed to get 50 people out of their homes last night,” County Administrator Frank Rock said. “We know of 15 people who still have to be rescued.”
Speaking to German broadcaster N-TV, Rock said authorities did not yet have an exact number of how many people died.
“One has to assume that under the circumstances some people did not manage to escape,” he said.
Officials said late Thursday that about 1,300 people were listed as missing in Germany, but cautioned that the higher number could be due to duplicate reports and difficulties reaching people due to disrupted roads and phone service.
After Germany, where more than 100 people have died, Belgium was hit hardest by floods, which destroyed homes and turned roads into wild rivers. Belgium’s Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden told the VRT network on Friday that the country’s official confirmed death toll had risen to 18. The number of missing is estimated to be 19.
Verlinden said the water level of the Meuse River, which flows from Belgium into the Netherlands, remained critical and several dams were in danger of collapsing. In the southern Dutch city of Venlo, authorities evacuated about 200 hospital patients due to the threat of flooding from the river.
After days of heavy rain in Western Europe, flash floods this week turned rivers and roads into torrents that swept away cars and collapsed homes across the region.
The wreckage of collapsed houses is pictured in the Blosem district of Erftstadt, Germany (AP Photo)
Thousands of people in Germany were left homeless when their homes were destroyed or deemed at risk by authorities, including several villages around the Steinbach Reservoir, which experts say could collapse under the weight of the floods.
Armin Laschet, the governor of Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia state, called an emergency cabinet meeting on Friday. The 60-year-old’s handling of the flood disaster is widely seen as a test for his ambitions to succeed German Chancellor Angela Merkel after the country’s national election on 26 September.
Rhineland-Palatinate state governor Malu Dreyer said the disaster showed the need to accelerate efforts to halt global warming. He accused Lachette and Merkel’s centre-right union bloc of obstructing efforts to achieve more greenhouse gas cuts in Germany, Europe’s largest economy and a major emitter of planet-warming gases.
“Climate change is no longer of the essence. We are experiencing it up close and painfully,” she told the Funke media group.
Steinmeier called for greater efforts to tackle global warming.
“Only if we fight climate change decisively will we be able to limit the extreme weather conditions we are experiencing now,” he said.
Experts say that such disasters may become more common due to climate change.
“Parts of Western Europe… it rained for two months in the space of two days. What’s worse is that the soil was already saturated with previous rains,” said Claire Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization.
While she said it was too early to blame floods and preceding heatwaves on rising global temperatures, Nullis said: “Climate change is already increasing the frequency of extreme events. And several single events have been shown to make global warming worse. “
Defense Ministry spokesman Arne Collatz said the German military had deployed more than 850 troops as of Friday morning, but the number “is increasing significantly as the need grows.” He said the ministry had introduced a “military disaster alarm”, a technological move that essentially decentralized decisions on how to use equipment to commanders on the ground.
Italy sent a team of civil protection officers and firefighters, as well as rescue dinghies, to Belgium to help search for people missing from the devastating floods.
Firefighters tweeted a photo of a team working in Tilf, south of Lige, to help rescue residents of a house trapped by rising water.
In the southern Dutch province of Limburg, which has also been badly hit by flooding, soldiers piled sandbags to fortify a 1.1-kilometre (0.7 mi) stretch along the Maas river, and police were able to evacuate some low-lying areas helped.
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