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Expert Schwanke in the investigation committee in Mainz: "We knew two days in advance that there could be a flood situation in the Ahr valley"
Photo: Frank Rumpenhorst / dpa
According to meteorologist Karsten Schwanke, the Ahr valley could have been evacuated before the flood disaster in mid-July last year.
"Even in the actual forecast on the evening of July 14 at 8 or 9 p.m. there would still have been enough time to get people out of there," said the TV presenter on Friday in the committee of inquiry into the flood disaster in the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament.
"I can only assume that the person who said in a panicked voice, 'We have to get everyone out,' was missing."
"We knew two days in advance that there could be flooding in the Ahr valley," said the expert.
By the late afternoon or early evening of July 14, "we knew there was extreme rainfall."
But: "I didn't know that this ten meter high tidal wave would come," emphasized Schwanke.
"I never expected that." In other regions, much higher amounts of rain fell that day.
In Sinzig, where the Ahr flows into the Rhine, it was a more or less normal rainy day.
As a meteorologist, he would like "close cooperation" with a hydrologist or other experts in such situations, said Schwanke.
In addition to the meteorological facts, the local conditions in the Ahr valley also played a decisive role.
He cited the very narrow, V-shaped valley with a section in which individual flood waves from the side valleys converge in the main valley as an example.
After a lot of rain in May and June, the soil was also wet and could not absorb as much water as the forest, according to Schwanke.
This has to do with the "dead and sick state" of the spruce forests on the upper reaches of the Ahr after the extremely dry years of 2018 and 2019.
»The forest could no longer store 90 percent of the probability of rain.
He probably couldn't save anything anymore.« The construction of the Ahr bridges, which acted as dams until they burst, also played a decisive role.
A total of 135 people died in the northern Rhineland-Palatinate in the flood disaster of July 14/15, 134 of them in the Ahr Valley.
Hundreds were injured and much of the valley was devastated.
wit/dpa