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Houses on the Kienbach: tree trunks, rubble and mud dammed the water within minutes
Photo: Jan Petter / DER SPIEGEL
Leonhard Heinz stands with his feet in the washed up sand, around him destroyed furniture, rubble and tree trunks pile up like small mountains.
Heinz stretches his arm to show where the water at his house reached: 1.63 meters high.
In the corridor of the apartment building that Heinz recently acquired, the brown streaks can still be seen days later like borders on the wall, it smells of oil.
The water, says Heinz, came up through the cellar on Sunday night and even tore the fire door and frame out of the wall
and then flowed further upwards.
The 83-year-old neighbor should have got four strong men from the fire department from her apartment on the mezzanine floor.
With her, the water of the Kienbach also streamed in through the bathroom window, the apartment has probably been destroyed down to the wooden floorboards under the laminate floor.
The severe storms have also hit Austria hard in the past few days. In Hallein near Salzburg, residents were washed through the streets and probably only survived with a lot of luck. In Kufstein, Tyrol, just across the German-Austrian border, several streams turned into torrential rivers and flooded the city center with water and several tons of mud from the mountains. Even if the extent is not as dramatic as in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, Mayor Martin Krumschnabel still sees a historic challenge. He told SPIEGEL: “This is a catastrophe of the century. This has simply never happened in the crowd. "
On the night of Sunday alone, more precipitation was measured than would otherwise be expected in the whole month.
It rained up to 190 liters of water per square meter in the tributaries of the side valleys, which then poured like a funnel in the direction of Kufstein.
From Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon, the fire brigade in Tyrol counted 536 missions, almost half of them in the fortress city alone.
In the meantime, the country has announced that it will assume half of the expected million dollar losses.
On the Tuesday morning after the catastrophe, there was hardly anything left to be seen of the flood in many places.
Only a few meters away from the Kienbach, the sewer cleaning employees make their way through the streets.
It is shortly before eleven in the morning when they have to fill the 9000 liter tank of their special vehicle with water for the second time.
Sven Gabler and his colleague have been on duty since seven o'clock to flush the sludge out of the sewers and make the pipes usable again. "Wipe down, carry on", is how Gabler describes the method on one of the drains after he has cleaned it with an oversized vacuum cleaner and then flushed the pipes free with 100 to 200 bar water pressure.
This task is likely to be repeated several hundred times, the two men will be on duty until at least Friday, at the same time other cleaning teams are moving through the city. It is a large-scale operation, he has not seen anything like it in 15 years, the colleague recalls. “And probably not before that either.” Above all, it is the mudslides, the landslides full of mud and rubble, that create a special situation here. In contrast to the flat country, the altitude here does not necessarily offer protection, on the contrary. Those who live up on the slope may be the first to be hit.
For Leonhard Heinz it is a total disaster. He and his brother had just taken over the house at the beginning of the month. 19 days later, the basement looks like a ruin. The flood not only blew the heavy fire door and frame out of the wall, it also destroyed the boilers. Even after pumping out several times, the brown mud is still about 20 centimeters high on the floor. Perhaps no other house in Kufstein was so badly damaged.
"We all knew that this could happen at some point," complains Heinz.
"But here in Tyrol it is better to pay the emergency aid afterwards than to do something consistently for storm protection beforehand." The problem was the small bridge over the Kienbach, right next to the house.
Here the flood washed up tree trunks, rubble and mud from the mountains, until at some point everything blocked the stream like a dam and finally the water dammed up chest high above the road.
The rungs of the railing just broke like toothpicks.
In fact, the three brooks in the urban area are known to be a danger, years ago the areas around the Kienbach were declared a "yellow zone" for flood protection.
Two years ago, an expert described the consequences of severe storms to the local council just as they are now.
But an additional overflow basin has so far only been discussed, not built.
Shortly after the disaster, the mayor announced that it should come.
However, residents doubt whether it would have really prevented the flood on its own.
"When in doubt, nature is stronger," says Apollonia Hajszan, who has a studio next door and tries to save what is left from her canvases.
Eyewitnesses to a natural disaster while on vacation
A little further down in the valley, the Trede family from Nienborstel in Schleswig-Holstein is having breakfast in the Hotel "Andreas Hofer" and recovering from the past three days.
Because the daughter is considering studying at the FH in Kufstein, the North Germans wanted to explore the city on the Inn and take a short vacation on the side.
Instead, they witnessed a natural disaster.
Shortly after arriving on Saturday evening in the rain, the siren could be heard all over the city, Ursula Trede recalls. Shortly thereafter, long wailing sirens announced the civil defense alarm. "We didn't know anything like that," says the 56-year-old, "but from then on it was clear that something was going wrong here." From their room, the Tredes could watch all night long as tree trunks and household items through the window Streets swam and basements full of water.
At this point in time, the population and visitors were asked to stay in their homes and avoid the ground floors.
Out of fear, says daughter Insa Trede, they hardly left the apartment the next day either.
All day long, father Rolf Trede, a farmer, received terrible news from colleagues in North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the evening they ordered pizza.
When the streets were finally poorly cleared, sightseeing was hardly to be thought of.
The funicular to the fortress didn't run anyway, and other facilities have also closed for the time being.
Even the mountains, which Rolf Trede would have loved to see closer, remained in the distance.
Also the Kaiserlift will probably not operate again for a few days because of a landslide.
The FH Kufstein finally looked at the Tredes on the laptop.
If you ask innkeepers and hoteliers how they experienced the extreme weather, many sigh and shake their heads uncertainly. Many got away with the horror, only at the bottom of the Inn are the traces clearly visible. A pizzeria suffered a total write-off, and the traditional restaurant Auracher Löchl, including the hotel and supposedly the world's largest gin bar, will remain closed for the time being. Dozens of yellow gloves that have been hung up to dry and a rubble container give an idea of the damage.
Despite the millions of dollars in damage, there is otherwise little evidence of the disaster, no public lawsuits or demands for support.
At the cable car, too, you don't want to talk too much about the current landslide or the long-term consequences of climate change.
Summer business has only just started, after months of standstill, tourists are finally romping around in the old town again.
Some visitors don't even seem to have noticed that the water was standing here recently.
A group of Dutch people are wondering about the sandbags at a café on the banks of the Inn.
The waiter smiles friendly over it.
If the guests are absent now, it would be the third disaster after the pandemic and flood.
Smiling is cheaper there.
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