I’ve just been looking through photos of the flooding that’s happened over the last few days across much of Northern Europe, I haven’t been paying much attention to the news on telly, and I haven’t seen a thread about it, so I thought I’d post the link to the article from The Atlantic. Anyone planning a trip across to the EU might want to have a close look at the areas affected.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/07/photos-catastrophic-flooding-across-western-europe/619473/

Yes, I’d seen suggestions of heavy rainfall in Germany on Wednesday but had a meeting in Brussels early Thursday morning. A British colleague was moaning about the London flooding so I asked my Belgian client how things were as is seen that Germany was badly affected but nothing much about Belgium and the Netherlands. She told me that it was quite bad, the army had been mobilized and that they were about to declare a state of emergency.
All looks quite awful, there was a video of the main square in Spa with a river, showing the hotel we’d stayed in 2 years ago.

Someone in a cycling group I’m in lives just on the edge of the affected area in Germany. He is OK, I think he is near the Moselle and the bigger rivers apparently coped ok, it was the smaller rivers in smaller towns that were devastated.

The scary thing is that if the glitch in the jet stream had been only a few hundred miles out, it would have been us dealing with 3 months worth of rain in 24 hours.

It reached down into Berchtesgaden and over the border into the Salzburg area of Austria too.

I am just south of Frankfurt and we had 50cm of rain forecast for last Wednesday, we were lucky and it never came. Some areas had 150cm of rain that day, there is a some pictures of a village where half the village looks to have been washed away now there is just a massive 4-5 metre deep hole.

A few years ago I cycled up the Moselle, there is a camp site about half way between Koblenz and Trier on an island in the river where I decided to camp. All the facilities were built up on pillars to the first floor level, to protect against flooding. I nervously laughed to myself as I settled into my sleeping bag and the rain started falling heavily.

I can’t work out the perspective on pic 2: it looks like the water has washed a 10m depth of topsoil away. Horrifying.

that’s a landslide, a quarry dam collapsed

https://metro.co.uk/2021/07/16/germany-floods-massive-sinkhole-appears-as-quarry-collapses-in-blessem-14939505/

short video of flood water from the previous link above

This flooding in Germany today is hard to wrap your head around. It really seems like the planet is trying to tell us something pic.twitter.com/o5vCEpk8mk

— Read Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (@JoshuaPotash) July 16, 2021

I work along the Danube in Austria. Yesterday was really bad and my tours were cancelled today. The water is going doing quite quickly though.

that’s a landslide, a quarry dam collapsed

Blimey.

You don’t need to speak German to understand this graphic from the German Weather service. The intense rain was the cause of the flash flooding late last week

https://twitter.com/DWD_presse/status/1415976169787232256/photo/1

I feel so sorry for all the people affected by this terrible flooding. Homes, lifetime memories and,of course,lives destroyed in seconds.

So sad.

I’m waiting on a delivery from Dortmund via DHL. selfishly hoping that the area and infrastructure not affected.

There was a stupid headline on the BBC website yesterday stating that scientists had failed to predict the severe weather. It was a serous misrepresentation of the facts, but i am sure it comforted the anti-science gammons.

@jimdubleyou – same here, I was looking at that photo, zooming in and out, just trying to get my head around what I was looking at, because I couldn’t grasp the scale of the damage! That’s going to take a lot of infill! There’s other photos showing just vast amounts of debris piled up, and a sea of barrels and bottles clogging up a waterway – just where do you start clearing it all up, especially where there are vehicles, caravans, etc jammed in with it, the railway bridge with tree trunks across the lines, and a car perched on top of gravestones! The personal losses are the most upsetting, the old lady sitting in her ruined home for two days, with her injured husband stuck in another room just breaks your heart.

There is a before and after slidey photo of that new valley on the BBC news website.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57880729

Scroll down, was originally flat fields.

My niece doing her bit for the British Army Bobsleigh team last year, in Königssee

The same track yesterday

More rain forecast this weekend so there’s a risk of all the hard work that’s helping to begin to clear up this devastation may be undone.

I’ve been watching Misha Charoudin’s YouTube for an insight to the work, and help needed

+1 for the apex folks and the clean-up work they are doing, it’s gonna take months/years for some of the affected areas to get back to any sort of normality.

Yeah may have got a bit dusty watching his videos. Wish there was more I could do to help apart from donate some cash

It actually gets worse, flood insurance in Germany is not generally included in your regular policy so you have to pay extra for it. The national average is 46% so there are a lot of people without flood insurance. The local stats are 47% in Nordrhein-Westfalen, 37% in Rheinland-Pfalz, 44% in Hessen and 38% in Bayern.

Usually if the householder is not covered they’re stuck. In this case it was such a  large event that the Federal Govt will step in and help out but it might not be enough to cover all the costs. The Federal and State Govts also have to work out how to reinstate the infrastructure, roads, utilities etc. etc. It is a genuine disaster.

Current estimates are €4-5Bn insured loss and probably €5-6Bn uninsured (i.e. pay for your own repairs or get Govt help).  It’s horrific

That before and after on the BBC site is horrific. I hate to think how much damage downstream of the picture the displaced material caused

Another video today from the apex crew, seeing the height that the water reached in two story houses is very unsettling viewing.

Don’t worry according to a “newspaper” that some prick keeps putting through my letterbox ,it’s all fake.

Although many senior political leaders in Germany have declared this was a climate change driven flooding event that’s a dangerous path to take. Currently this flood event cannot be directly attributed to CC. Attribution studies within the next 6-18 months by serious academic establishments will clarify this.

What can be said with certainty of that the frequency of these extreme flooding events will increase in the future.

Just watched the latest misha video. Looks horrendous out there.
On the climate change front you have to assume it has made it worse, but yes these storms do occasionally happen.
Has got me wondering what it would look like where i live if 20cm+ fell in 24hrs.
Wonder if anyone has done any mapping

Mapping of the flood event or the general flood risk?

The event itself is hard to map due to the flash flood element. The downstream riverine flooding is much easier to map with cloud penetrating satellite tech

I just found the uk gov flood risk maps which interestingly have surface water runoff flooding risk for extreme weather events, along with river and sea flood risk.
Pretty interesting maps. But yeah seeing the level of water fallen in such a short time it would be hard to map and assess the worst case outcome

This is why there are flood modelling companies out there to assess the wider risk from pluvial, fluvial and coastal flooding