Fear of more floods in western Germany feared more than 80 deaths

By Martin Schlicht and David Sahl

SCHULD / ERFTSTADT, Germany (Reuters) – There were more floods in western Germany fearing another dam broke on Friday and more than 80 dead in the worst mass loss in Germany in recent years.

Entire communities were in ruins, swollen by rivers after crossing towns in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate.

“Suffering is on the rise,” Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister Malu Dreyer told the ZDF broadcaster, adding that more than 50 people have been killed in floods in his state alone.

The infrastructure has been completely destroyed, and rebuilding will cost a lot of time and money, he said.

Nearby North Rhine-Westphalia, about 1,300 people were missing in the Ahrweiler district of southern Cologne, the district government said on Facebook (NASDAQ :).

Mobile phone networks have collapsed in some flood-hit regions, which means relatives and friends can’t find their loved ones.

Further north, in Erftstadt, near Cologne, houses collapsed on Friday morning and rescue teams were fighting despite warnings that they were returning home to help residents, the Cologne district government said on Facebook.

He said many people were still in their homes and several were missing. A gas leak further hampered rescue workers as people stranded as they tried to reach the boat.

The roads around Erftstadt were impassable as they were washed away by floods.

One dam near the Belgian border, Rurtalsperre, was flooded overnight, while another, Steinbachtalsperre between Ahrweiler and Erftstadt, was unstable. Several dams have already exploded in some parts of the country.

The death toll is the highest among the natural disasters in Germany since 1962, when a deadly flood in the North Sea killed about 340 people. The crash of a high-speed ICE (NYSE 🙂 train in 1998 killed 101 people.

The 2002 floods on the river Elbe, which at the time were covered by the media as “floods once a century”, killed 21 people in eastern Germany and more than 100 in the wider Central European region.

The North Rhine-Westphalia parliament will hold an emergency meeting on the floods on Friday.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told Spiegel magazine that the federal government wants to provide financial assistance to the affected regions as soon as possible, and a package of measures to go to the cabinet on Wednesday should be added.