(CN) — Northern Europe was reeling from catastrophic flooding on Friday after rain-swollen rivers burst their banks and plowed through villages, towns and cities in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, killing more than 120 people with hundreds of others still reported missing.
Hurricane-like downpours from a slow-moving storm system filled rivers beyond capacity on Wednesday and Thursday, releasing floodwaters that turned city streets in Germany and Belgium into raging rivers that carried away homes, cars, bridges, roads and people.
More than 100 people were killed in Germany, making it the country’s worst natural disaster since a deadly North Sea flood in 1962 killed 340 people. Belgian authorities have reported about 20 deaths.
Large-scale evacuations were ordered Friday in some parts of Germany and Belgium as rivers, including the Rhine, continued to rise, putting at risk dams, levees and other flood-control structures. More than 100,000 Germans were without power.
Images from the disaster zone showed deep and fast-moving floodwaters sweeping through towns and scouring roads, bridges and stone buildings. Bild, a German news magazine, showed photographs from Schuld, a village along the Ahr River, where multiple wooden homes collapsed, killing people inside.
The heaviest damage was in the western German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, but rivers in neighboring Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands were also dangerously overflowing. Parts of Liege, the third largest city in Belgium, were inundated.
At least 50 people were killed in the Ahrweiler district in Rhineland-Palatinate. In the town of Sinzig, 12 residents of a home for people with intellectual disabilities drowned when water rushed into their facility and quickly reached the height of the ceiling. Some residents were saved, according to news reports.
Disaster also struck Erftstadt-Blessem, a town outside Cologne. Images and video show houses sucked down a massive landslide triggered by the angry waters of a flooded Erft River.
Local authorities in Germany and elsewhere are facing accusations they failed to adequately warn the public about the risk of flooding.
The European Flood Awareness System issued an “extreme” flood warning earlier in the week, but it appears the warning was not heeded by many, though evacuations were ordered in some areas. Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at the University of Reading who advises EFAS, told Politico it was “a monumental failure of the system.”
By Friday morning, the death toll had eclipsed a hundred, but more than 1,300 people were still reported missing in the stranded German district of Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler. It is possible, though, that these individuals are alive but unable to use their cellphones.
The German military and emergency responders were deployed to rescue people from homes, trees and rooftops with boats and helicopters. Help was arriving from other parts of Europe, too, and the European Union was mobilizing its disaster-response system.
In this part of Europe, the flooding is the worst in decades. Compounding the disaster is its timing: hitting picturesque and attractive regions of forest-covered hills, wending rivers, castles and gorgeous river towns and cities that are also, for the first time since the pandemic started, swelling this summer with tourists and nature lovers.
By Friday afternoon, with floodwaters receding in devastated upriver areas, residents began the arduous and painful cleanup of water-logged homes and crews cleared roads of debris, worked to restore power and to reach towns cut off by floodwaters and missing roads and bridges. Thousands of evacuees and those made homeless were housed in shelters and strangers’ homes.
German officials have not provided damage estimates, but the extent of the wreckage will require months, if not years, of costly reconstruction.
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