The death toll has passed 100 and hundreds more people remain missing in Belgium and Germany after strong rains caused rivers to burst and wash away buildings. Photo:AP
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | JULY 16th 2021
Climate scientists were reportedly shocked by the record-breaking scale of the recent floods that had hit Germany in the past week over a wide area, in yet another instance of man-made extreme weather.
On Wednesday, plenty of precipitation records had been broken over a wide area of the Rhine basin, as heavy floods had spread in a much quicker and wider manner than scientists had predicated they could.
Following the severe heatwaves that caused an increase in draughts and deaths across both the Western United States and Canada, scientists and people alike were growing highly fearful of the potential extreme weather circumstances that could be felt in Europe as well. This recent German deluge is thought to be one such effect of the man-made changing climate.
“I am surprised by how far it is above the previous record,” said Dieter Gerten, a professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
Tens of thousands of homes had been flooded as a result, alongside power cuts. Nearly 100 deaths had been recorded thus far, though the actual numbers may be higher with over 1,000 people still reported missing. Within only 48 hours, the parts of the Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia had been flooded with at least 148 litres of rain per sq metre, in a region that typically only gets an average of 80 litres in all of July time.
A state of emergency had been declared in the city of Hagen, after the banks of the Volme had burst and the deluge was underway. Though scientists have been predicting and warning of the possibility of such effects as a cause of climate change for years, they had still be shocked by the sheer volume and speed of this particular flood.
“This week’s event is totally untypical for that region. It lasted a long time and affected a wide area,” said Gerten, who had added that he’d actually grown up in a village found in the affected areas. He stated that the region had seen occasional floods, but never of this severity.
