Flood fury in southern Germany: Communities battle deluge disaster

Breached flood embankments, dams and evacuated villages; the situation is catastrophic. Floods continue to plague southern Germany.

Tobias Kunz has been under constant stress since six o'clock on Saturday. The mayor of Nordendorf, a municipality north of Augsburg with a population of about 2,600, is desperately fighting the flood of the Schmutter River, a right-bank tributary of the Danube just under 60 miles long. He is trying to save the local primary school with three hundred volunteers.

"Yesterday we filled 40,000 sandbags and built a 240-meter-long dike with them. Some of the helpers have been on their feet for 40 hours without sleep. But with the extreme amounts of water today, even that wasn't enough."

Volunteers hastily move black sandbags from one corner to another, and Kunz coordinates the whole action. He is bombarded with questions almost every second. Classes will be cancelled this Monday, he assures with a sad smile. But what particularly depresses him is the almost instantaneously lost battle for the new sports field as the dam bursts.

"Our school sports field, which cost around a million to build, was under water in a quarter of an hour. The entire infrastructure is flooded. Our sewage system is also not working, so the students can't even go to the toilet," he laments.

Nordendorf is now experiencing what many towns and villages in southern Germany have already gone through. Flood embankments and dams cannot hold back the vast masses of water, and dozens of villages must be evacuated. The initial tally is that in some places, more rain fell in a day than usually in an entire month, and the waters have risen to levels reached only once in a hundred years. This weekend, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria were particularly affected. In some municipalities, a state of emergency has been declared. One firefighter died, and at least one person is missing.

For many, the scale of the flood was an absolute surprise, for example, for four young men in Kühlenthal, a few miles further south. They don't quite know what to do. They can no longer get to the house they hastily defended with sandbags yesterday. The village was evacuated, and it is impossible to reach it on foot, even with wellingtons.

"It's the house of one of our parents, who are on vacation in Austria. We tried to save what we could yesterday. But the water came from all directions. At least we were able to drive the two cars up the mountain and bring them to safety," they tell DW in an interview.

Six car owners were not so lucky in Diedorf, a few miles west of Augsburg. The underground parking lot and the basements of nearby houses were completely flooded. Using specialist equipment, workers from the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (Technisches Hilfswerk, THW) were pumping about 2,600 gallons of brown sludge per minute.

In Diedorf, the flood barrier and dam burst. Although the flood is slowly receding and the water level is dropping, no one at the small fire station wants to hear that it's all over. This includes Philipp Niegl, the so-called first commander of the fire brigade. Like everyone else, Niegl is a volunteer firefighter. He works at a vocational school as a teacher. Perhaps that's why he is so calm. "After the flood of the century in the Ahr valley [in 2021], we added to our equipment to be better prepared: we now have a supply truck that can drive through deep water. This time it was able to transport a lot of people," he says.

Evacuees who did not find accommodation with relatives or friends could spend the night in the nearby sports hall in Diedorf. In Augsburg, the vast exhibition centre is the central shelter for all those stranded in the city. A refuge for three hundred people was set up in record time.

Augsburg has experience in disaster management, emphasizes the spokesman for the city's aid organizations, Raphael Doderer, who recalls that at Christmas 2016, the town had to evacuate 54,000 people because of a World War II bomb.

"We had 170 people here last night, at noon it was still 130 and now 80," Doderer tells DW. "Most of them are elderly people who live in nursing homes, including dementia patients. We had to carry some of the senior citizens out of the house to a boat with a Unimog truck, then back into a Unimog truck and finally into the ambulance" he recounts.

A few elderly people remained in the vast reception hall, including Sabine Fischer's parents and two friends from the neighbourhood. For the Fischer family, the night ended at two a.m. The Schmutter River, which winds typically calmly behind the house through Kühlenthal and is barely 2 feet wide, suddenly swelled to 13 feet, and water was pouring into the basements.

"We are waiting and waiting here and don't know how much water has penetrated our property. It was simply inconceivable to us that it would be so bad. Our only wish: To go home as soon as possible," Fischer says in an interview with DW.