Entire towns in western Germany were destroyed last week by "the flood of the century", said Susanne Scholz in Express, and the whole country is in shock. The images on TV news looked like they were coming from a tropical monsoon zone (热带季风区), not our first-world nation. Never did we think we would see our own citizens "trapped in houses on the edge of crash, in danger of being swept away by masses of water".
Days of severe rain got rivers to burst their banks in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, and in neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands. In the small town of Sinzig, the River Ahr reached its highest level at about 23 feet, flooding a nursing home and drowning 12 disabled residents who could not flee.
Authorities have so far confirmed some 200 deaths across Germany, but hundreds more people remain missing. While authorities say it's too early to put a price tag on the damage, the images of flooded homes and electrical stations, damaged bridges, and cars crumpled (变皱) by fallen trees tell a tale of vast material loss. "The German language hardly knows any words for the damage that has been brought about," said Chancellor Angela Merkel. She praised the thousands of volunteers who came to pump out water, load sandbags, and search for survivors.
"Disaster control clearly failed," said Peter Tiede in Bild. State and local authorities responsible for evacuation (疏散) warnings relied on smartphone apps that many Germans don't have — and service was out anyway because the storms had downed the cell towers. Only old-fashioned alarms work in such emergencies, yet our few loudspeaker vans never left the stations. Public radio, meanwhile, "was playing pop music while hundreds of people were being washed away, houses collapsing, villages torn down to the ground." It's simply unforgivable. "How bad will it get when such a flood hits a major city like Cologne or Hamburg instead of villages and small towns?"
