MIn mid-May, a new state parliament will be elected in North Rhine-Westphalia. That is why the parliamentary investigative committee has very little time to deal with the flood disaster in mid-July last year in the most populous federal state alone, which killed 49 people and caused property damage amounting to many billions of euros. The committee is currently hearing witnesses sometimes late into the night, as was the case on Friday. The fact that there were significant problems with the flow of information between the authorities and a fatal chain of misinterpretations before and during the disaster was made clear as early as late summer by interim reports from the black-yellow state government. A new detail completed the picture in the most recent session.
Contrary to previous assumptions, the five North Rhine-Westphalian district governments did not pass on four “Hydrological Status Reports” – in which comparatively general warnings were given – to the cities and district administrations from July 13th to 15th. This was noticed just a month after the catastrophe during the internal investigation in the Ministry of the Interior. On August 17, the district president of Münster informed the responsible department head in the ministry by e-mail that her house had never forwarded the hydrological situation reports prepared by the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (LANUV). This did not happen in the other four district governments either. In the past, too, the reports had not been forwarded to the municipalities. As a consequence of the devastating catastrophe, the district president suggested creating a new nationwide “flood forecasting center”.
Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) apparently knew nothing about the matter for more than five months. On Friday evening, a witness in the investigative committee said when asked by the SPD that officials from the Ministry of the Interior had agreed to remove the information from the Münster district president from a template for the minister, because she had only “sent the information personally and confidentially”. At the request of the FAZ, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior confirmed that “Minister Reul was not informed about the process at the time” and only found out about it “through press reports” at the weekend. The Ministry of the Interior itself did not receive the hydrological situation reports directly from LANUV, which reports to the Ministry of the Environment, during the flood. The Interior Ministry corrected this “year-long practice” on August 6, according to the spokesman.
Difficult to understand for non-hydrologists
However, experts repeatedly point out that the flood situation reports do not contain any precise information on specific local flood hazards and are difficult to understand for non-hydrologists. In fact, in the management report of July 13th, for example, there was only a general warning that “water levels will rise rapidly” in the catchment areas of the Erft and two other rivers in particular, which also applies to – unspecified – “other catchment areas of NRW, whereby regarding the intensity, duration and distribution of the precipitation and the associated runoff situation, large differences can occur”. Similarly precise warnings as for the district of Ahrweiler, which was even informed by the Rhineland-Palatinate State Office for the Environment in mid-July that the enormous level of almost seven meters was to be expected, did not exist in North Rhine-Westphalia even on July 14 for any of the affected regions. In North Rhine-Westphalia, many rivers and streams swelled at the same time in mid-July, especially between Aachen and Cologne and in the Hagen area.
Just a few days ago, the North Rhine-Westphalian Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser (CDU) announced that smaller bodies of water would also be equipped with a forecasting system as soon as possible. So far, the focus has been too much on large bodies of water like the Rhine. As a first step, a model-based forecast for the flood notification level is to be introduced in the spring for twelve small rivers such as the Erft – in whose course and catchment area there was particularly bad devastation in July. The minister left it open when there should be a central office in North Rhine-Westphalia that would issue specific warnings in the event of an acute risk of flooding.
By autumn, however, there should at least be a state regulation for the organization of reporting channels and reporting chains. In addition, the storm and flood warnings should not only be easier to understand for the general public with the help of uniform language rules, but also misunderstandings, such as those that occurred between meteorologists and hydrologists in July, should be avoided.
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