The end of the year was exceptionally rainy in Germany and caused severe flooding in many regions, causing critical situations and forcing evacuations of the population and animals. Now concerns about a further rise in water levels are growing, as the German Meteorological Service announces the arrival of new heavy rainfall. The states most affected are Lower Saxony, parts of North Rhine-Westphalia, southern Saxony-Anhalt and north of Thuringia. The situation is also tense in northern and eastern Bavaria. Last night the water levels in Bremen and Lower Saxony were of great concern.
The dramatic image of a farm in the Bremen hamlet of Timmersloh, almost completely submerged, was circulating on the web. Animals from various farms were evacuated near it, thanks to rescue efforts coordinated via WhatsApp among farmers who demonstrate great cohesion in this situation. And, thanks to the numerous emergency services, many localities are fighting against the water invading the lands, securing embankments and building additional protective barriers.
Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Daniela Behrens predicts that the situation in the state will continue to be critical: “We still have difficult days ahead of us to fight this flood,” she said in an interview. The situation in the north-west of the Land between the Weser and the Ems is particularly critical. “Unfortunately the water levels there are rising again,” Behrens said, explaining that the banks have been under water for days. In the Land itself there is now a shortage of sandbags to strengthen the embankments, so Lower Saxony has had to ask for help from the reserves of other Länder: around 500,000 arrived from North Rhine-Westphalia, 330,000 from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, around 250,000 bags were supplied by Schleswig-Holstein and approximately 400,000 bags from Hesse.
Lower Saxony can also count on the help of France which is sending a system of mobile embankments approximately 1.2 kilometers long, as announced by the Ministry of the Interior. In many flooded areas, school lessons were suspended. While emergency services are busy dealing with ongoing floods, experts are calling on the German government to reconsider plans to protect against the force of the waters. “Due to climate change we will definitely see other types of floods in the future,” Ralf Merz, a hydrologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Halle, told Deutschlandfunk. “Such prolonged flood events will certainly occur more often in the future.” And the German Red Cross is calling for better disaster preparedness. There are “obvious deficits”, especially in terms of equipment, said President Gerda Hasselfeldt.
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