Storms caused heavy flooding across parts of western and central Europe overnight, and a person caught in a frenzy by a raging stream in eastern Germany remained missing on Wednesday.
Firefighters resumed their look for the person within the Saxony state town of Joehstadt on Wednesday morning. German press agency DPA reported that he had been trying to secure his property from rising waters when he disappeared.
Firefighters within the city of Hagen, within the North Rhine-Westphalia state, rescued several drivers whose vehicles got stuck during a flooded underpass. Videos on social media showed streets within the western German city crammed with knee-high water et al. buried by landslides.
A fallen tree trapped a lady within the German town of Mettmann, and responders had to carry her head to stay her from drowning in rising floodwaters until firefighters could free her. Residents in nearby Erkrath were warned to not shower or use their washers because the rain had overloaded the local sewer system.
Hof county in Bavaria issued a disaster alert late Tuesday as basements crammed with water, trees were uprooted and a few areas lost power overnight. Germany’s DWD weather service said the region saw 80 liters (more than 21 gallons) of rain per square meter within the space of 12 hours.
German government spokesman Steffen Seibert described the pictures from regions hardest hit by flooding as terrible.
Even though not every event, not every flooding or local incident, is said to global climate change, many scientists tell us that the frequency, intensity, and therefore the regularity with which this happens may be a consequence of global climate change, Seibert said.
DWD meteorologists predicted further extreme storms within the western and central parts of Germany through Thursday, with peak rainfall possibly reaching 200 liters per square meter.
In the neighboring Czech Republic, firefighters received 800 calls about incidents starting from fallen trees to flooded basements. A highway linking the capital, Prague, to the east of the country partly flooded overnight. Thousands of households remained without electricity on Wednesday.
Mud inundated houses in some towns in eastern Belgium as sustained rains hit the Ardennes hills hard. The tourist center of Spa, on the brink of the famed Formula One track, couldn’t handle the water streaming down from the encompassing hills that turned streets into rivers.
Cars piled on top of 1 another and cellars flooded, but no serious injuries were reported.
The Belgian meteorological institute issued an alert Wednesday for the zone around Liege, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Brussels, which was forecast to get more rain during a day than the world would normally receive during a whole summer month. The rain is predicted to last until Friday.
Authorities within the Netherlands warned the heavy rainfall within the southern province of Limburg could turn streams into dangerously fast-flowing torrents and urged the general public to remain far away from them. Boat owners were advised to steer beyond the Maas river thanks to strong currents and debris being washed downstream.
