![]() A glass water barrier has been proposed as a solution during this project. “We drive through here every day and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.The Herik/Strukton vof consortium is working on a two-year project for the Limburg Water Authority to strengthen the dike at Neer in the municipality of Leudal. “It’s absolutely shocking,” one young couple said. People from nearby villages arrived to check on their neighbours. Improvised bags of potting soil and sandbox sand had failed to keep the flood from seeping past: water marks on the older brick buildings showed it reaching at least over a metre high. Water was oil-slicked and the smell of gas hung in the air. ![]() On Friday afternoon, the town was nearly empty of people, other than soldiers trying in vain to keep onlookers at bay.Īt the far end of Frauentaler Strasse, normally 100 metres from the Erft, a redbrick building was missing its bottom floors, the walls hanging precariously over the flood water. “It flows much faster here than elsewhere and lacks the natural floodplains that could deal with overflow.” “Where the Erft passes Erftstadt it is no longer a naturally flowing river but more like an artificially straightened canal,” Habel tells the Guardian. Matthias Habel, a Bonn-based geographer who studied flood protection measures in the area as part of his degree, says the catastrophic outcome of the floods would not come as a surprise to those familiar with the situation on the ground. The protective wall between the gravel pit and the Erft proved ineffective as the water overflowed higher up the river, gushing through the streets of the town before collecting at the lowest point. When the owners of the Blessem gravel quarry applied for an expansion in 2015, local authorities granted their request on the condition they would build a 1.2km protective wall to prevent the pit from filling with water in the event of a flood.īut the kind of extreme weather events the world is seeing with increasing frequency come with unpredictable consequences. Storms and floods are nothing new in Rhein-Erft-Kreis, an area dotted with opencast mines historically used to extract brown coal, gravel or sand. Police say they used boats to rescue about 50 people from their homes. Officials say many others in the town did not heed the warning to leave. Neugebauer says they had left before receiving any official evacuation orders. Parts of the A1 motorway outside the town crumbled and collapsed into the Erft. Water along Luxemburger Strasse, the main thoroughfare connecting Erftstadt to Cologne, appears to have rushed in without warning, trapping lorries and cars alike, throwing vehicles up against guardrails and along the crumbling walls of the on-ramp. Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock “We waited as long as we could, but when we saw the trucks on Luxemburger Strasse underwater we packed up the car and the kids and went to a family in the next town over.”Ī flooded road in Erftstadt-Blessem. “We were constantly riding our bikes through town, watching as the river waters grew higher,” says Neugebauer. When the river burst its banks the following day, it nonetheless caught many in Erftstadt by surprise. “Now it was a foaming stream like the Rhine.” ![]() ![]() “We have the Rotbach brook here that often dries out in the summer,” Zens says. “But we spent 18 hours pumping out water through the night, and in the end we had a lucky escape.”īut as Zens managed to drain his farm, waters in the rivers, brooks and streams that cross the region were beginning to rise. “For a while we thought we would have to evacuate our 200 animals,” says farmer Peter Zens, who runs the Gertrudenhof petting zoo in Hürth, located halfway between Erftstadt and Cologne. 01:19 Drone footage shows giant sinkhole in German town after deadly floods – video ![]()
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