District Administrator Jürgen Pföhler (July 29, 2021): Should appear for the first time in the evening in the state parliament investigation committee "Flood Disaster".
Photo:
Thomas Frey / dpa
An evaluation of cell phone calls and SMS traffic by the then District Administrator Jürgen Pföhler was presented to the investigative committee for the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley.
An investigator from the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office said that the CDU politician had the most contact with his closest employee in the district office until late at night on the day of the flash flood.
The second most frequent contacts were therefore with a woman from his private environment, whose data was stored under a pseudonym in the mobile phone.
Pföhler sent the following SMS text to them on July 15 at 12:50 a.m.: "Disaster, dead, injured, people on roofs, no helicopter, power failures, our house is flooded, I'm at the end."
"I hope the house doesn't collapse"
According to the LKA investigator, it was not possible to determine where the district administrator of the Ahrweiler district was in the evening and at night.
The location data was not recorded and the reason for this was unknown, the witness said.
At around 10:25 p.m. he sent a text message to the woman in which he reported that the evacuation was imminent and that "everyone with the animals" had to go out onto the street.
"I hope the house doesn't collapse," the text ended.
Pföhler also found out about the flood situation on the Internet several times in the evening, the policewoman said.
A total of 77 answered calls from Pföhler were registered between the early morning of July 14, 2021 and July 15 at 2:30 a.m., but some of them were less than 20 seconds long.
Therefore, it is unclear whether the talks came about, said the investigator.
Of the 51 text messages, 18 were related to the flash flood.
The content of the phone calls is not known.
According to the investigator's evaluation, cell phone contacts were limited to telephone calls and text messages;
the messenger service WhatsApp was not installed on the cell phone.
Pföhler himself is to appear for the first time in the state parliament's investigative committee on "flood catastrophe" from 6 p.m. later in the session.
The politician's wife was also invited as a witness to the meeting of the committee in the Mainz state parliament.
However, both had already announced that they would exercise their right to refuse to testify or provide information.
The public prosecutor's office is investigating Pföhler because of warnings and evacuations that may have been too late.
bbr/dpa