Home » Floods wreak havoc in western Europe; botched warnings

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Floods wreak havoc in western Europe; botched warnings — 26 Comments

  1. The Netherlands know that water is a serious threat, and plan ahead. Have done so for a long time.

  2. Much of the damage in Germany occurred in NorthRhine Westphalia, which is led by the guy who seeks to replace Merkel, incompetents all around. My cat could run the country better. And, of course, they are all going to push for BS to stop climate change. That will be all we hear in the upcoming election campaigns.

  3. On the Texas Coastal Bend, we had 25 inches of rain in three days a couple of weeks ago. It was no picnic, some people got water in their homes, and roads were nearly impassable for a couple of days. I know we all remember that Hurricane Harvey dumped 60 inches in a single day on Houston. Areas just south of Houston got 45 inches in one day in 1978.

    I was shocked to see the images of devastation in Germany, but even more shocked when I finally found articles specifying what “unprecedented” and “catastrophic” rain totals meant: between 4 and 8 inches. I realize even 4-8 inches can be awful in areas that, unlike my own Gulf Coast, aren’t flat. Still, is it possible that those quaint old German towns have never experienced 4-8 inches before? It’s not an arid country. Their rainfall must be incredibly modest, but reliable, to sustain so much agriculture and forested land without ever topping 8 inches in a day for centuries at a time.

  4. According to this news item, the flooding wave began to cause damage on July 12. But much of Europe was highly distracted around that time, as Italy was representing the EU in the World Cup soccer championship against those EU traitors, the U.K.

    On July 11 Italy beat the U.K., so that requires at least a day or two of getting drunk and cheering Italy and the EU. And who wants to listen to Professor Hannah Cloke of the University of Reading? Another Brit. traitor.

    Small joke, maybe. Maybe not. Apparently, the people of the EU zone really wanted to stick it to the Brits. in soccer.

  5. The default answer on CNN was global warming. No other explanation or facts even discussed. Fake News. They don’t even try to be accurate and neutral.

  6. I’ve been watching a French made TV series called “The Earth’s Furies” which covers the obvious gamut including floods. Apparently, in 1910, Paris was hit with massive floods. They also covered some Euro flooding within the last decade or two, but I think 110 years ago was the big one.

  7. According to the reporting there has never been previous flooding in those flood zones.

  8. Talked to a guy who’d spent time in Sweden. He said some Swedes think Americans are always in mortal peril. Alligators in the swimming pool. Rattlesnakes on the patio. Brown recluse in the wood pile. Fatal dehydration sitting in the shade in Phoenix at 14% humidity. Forest fires. Earthquakes. Signs in condos in the mountains: “Do not take out trash before dawn or after dark.”

    Floods like that which annoyed Noah.

    If your extremes are not all that extreme, planning for an extreme is not a high priority, nor is paying attention to yet another warning from the nanny state.

  9. Barry Meislin. Immigrants from where? The South Side of Chicago, Compton, Philly, and is it the Crips and Bloods, the Black P Stones, MS-13? Inquiring minds want to know.

  10. This brings to mind the terrible floods in China last year at this time. Official death count: under 220. I wonder what the real number was.

  11. @Eva Marie:

    Probably no more than 500 or a thousand.

    People fundamentally misunderstand how censorship and propaganda work in China.

    When you control the press… and more to the point most people who work for the press are *not* actively working to subvert and destroy society (Hello, Westerners) then it’s OK to be pretty honest about disasters and accidents. What gets censored are the small stuff daily irritations and anything requiring a truly Big Lie (i.e. Wuhan Lab stuff).

    A natural disaster in China always follows the same reporting trend:

    1) Nature Does its thing. Tragedy ensues. Lots of pictures of the damage. LOTS of pictures of brave PLA soldiers carrying sandbags to shore up levees, digging people out, etc.

    2) Heartwarming stories of individual heroism.

    3) If disaster sufficiently large, inspection visit by No. 2 or No. 3 who plugs some gaps in response and further alleviates people’s hardship.

    4) If any corruption or mismanagement involved, suitable scapegoats are found and pilloried. More often than not these days it’s the correct guilty parties. Disasters are often a good opportunity for the Central Government to sniff out corruption, cronyism and banditry in local officialdom and clean house.

    5) Several months later will be stories of reconstruction and recovery. And it’s all neatly tied up in a bow and that’s all she wrote.

    Now compare that awful hive-minded slitty-eyed robotic totalitarian hell with what we have in the West.

  12. Note also that this system was set up under the EU banner, and it doesn’t sound as though it filtered down to the more local authorities.

    Brussels bureaucrats are designed for pomp and posture, not for mere service to constituents.

  13. The same people who can’t predict weather 12 hours out, can’t organize a response to extreme weather in 24 hours, and can’t plan for a rainy day that is supposedly caused by the AGW they’ve been screaming about for 20 years – expect me to turn over civilization to them because, . . reasons.

  14. “till, is it possible that those quaint old German towns have never experienced 4-8 inches before?”

    Typical bollocks to create drama and panic.
    Of course it’s rained this much before in a day, and more. In fact it happens several times a year.

    What’s different this time is that it happened after the upstreams regions and the local soil had already been filled to capacity by the rain of the previous months.
    The Netherlands and surrounding areas of Belgium and Germany have had over twice as much rain as normal every months this year from February.
    The soil is saturated, the rivers were already at maximum pre-flood levels and had been for weeks.
    Lakes and reservoirs were filled to capacity.

    Essentially it was a disaster waiting to happen, on a scale similar or worse to a very harsh winter in the Alps with excessive snow followed by a very sudden thaw (which happens once in a while and also causes flooding in the Rhine and Meuse).

    Usually that flooding is restricted to the Netherlands because the Germans manage to predict it and direct all the water downstream to where it doesn’t bother them.
    This time however it was so much water and the ground so saturated and weak that the ground itself collapsed into the riverbeds in Germany.

  15. @Arty:

    And woe betide it if it doesn’t fall in cubical droplets.

    They won’t let an opportunity go to waste. There’s going to be a growth industry in flood-abatement boondoggles for a few years now.

    This has happened in HK. Everything which can be concreted has been concreted. There’s probably a culvert for every man, woman and child.

  16. Re: Tommy Jay
    You think Brits should show more loyalty to a 30 year-old Frankenstein political entity that is an anti-democratic administrative nightmare over their own country that has existed for over a millenium? The Brits were just the first to recognize and act on the fact that the EU is an unworkable mess that serves the interests of the Germans and the French primarily at the expense of its other members. I predict more defections in coming years.

  17. Looking at the photos and videos I was struck by the fact that many of damaged buildings are sited on the flood plains of the rivers.

    Never, ever, build on a flood plain.

  18. It should be a wake up call. Countries that have globalist politicians who are pro open border, vocally anti climate change etc are taking their eye of the more mundane tasks such a management and governance.

  19. Netherlands might have received less rain, but the Rhein empties into it while carrying all that German rainfall.

  20. The causes of the European flood event are pretty much the same as flood events in the US. The natural flow patterns have been interrupted. River courses have been engineered and constrained by walls, dikes, and levies. People have built into the former flood plains rather than on the high ground where towns were previously built for protection from invaders. Heavy rain events result in water concentrations greater than what engineers predicted, rivers and streams overflow the artificial constraints and flood the towns. A few decades ago, the Mississippi River again flooded, homes were recently rebuilt after many previous flooding, were destroyed. The owners set about getting federally guaranteed loans to rebuild in the same locations. The loans were denied unless the location was changed to much higher ground. In the time since then, the Big Muddy has flooded several more times but without the vast destruction. The solution was simple and effective – get people and property out of nature’s way.

  21. I lived in Germany for a total of 10 years between 1971 and 1990, all in the Wiesbaden area. The Rhine flooded about every other year, as did the Main and the Mosel. I worked in imagery intelligence, and saw the result of flooding all throughout the main European flood zones. When you build for “most likely” and Nature doesn’t cooperate, you have disasters.

  22. Of course AGW caused the flooding. Floods, hurricanes and tornados never ever happened before humans started pumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.

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