Germany’s “Katrina”: Officials Left Dams Full For Weeks Even With Heavy Rains In The Forecast

Officials left dams full to the brim at least 3 weeks long during a rainy period and then failed to undertake a controlled release even when 150 mm of rain were forecast 4 days before the floods. 

Now they want to hide their gross incompetence and blame climate change.

Yesterday I posted how Germany’s flood disaster could have been prevented in large part, especially in terms of lives lost. The latest death toll has risen to over 150.

Although the heavy rains had been forecast days in advance, nothing was done to avert the inevitable destruction. Instead of taking responsibility, politicians are blaming climate change in a bid to shift attention away from their incompetence and gross negligence.

Negligence worse than we thought

But it turns out the gross negligence may have been even worse than we thought: Dams constructed to regulate the flow of mountain streams and rivers had been left full for weeks before the disaster struck – despite Europe being stuck in a rainy period.

For illustration purpose only. Photo by: Hahnenkleer. Copyright: see here.

No controlled release to add dam volume 

One independent journalist, Henning Rosenbusch, tweeted at Twitter a clip of a German citizen commenting to a “Welt” reporter:

The resident in a flooded region tells  the “Welt” reporter how every week he rides his mountain bike along dams that hold back waters in valleys. “I noticed that for the last 3 weeks all dams were full to the top – up to just 20 – 30 cm from the brim. These dams are there to hold back the water. Why didn’t they release some of the water in a controlled way much earlier? For me it’s unimageable. This whole thing should not have happened if there had been 10 or 20% more available volume in the dams.”

The reporter answered: “That’s criticism I’ve heard again and again today.”

Dereliction of duty?

Three weeks long dams were left full to the top even with long range forecasts (14 days) showing more and more rain on the way. It’s been a rainy summer, and there were no signs things would change soon.

Then 4 days before the catastrophe struck, meteorologists warned that up to 150 mm of rain was on the way. The filled dams were ticking time bombs that needed to be defused – and there was the opportunity to do so. But for whatever reason, nothing was undertaken by the authorities to release water behind the dams in a controlled manner  to create capacity and slow the downstream flow.





27 responses to “Germany’s “Katrina”: Officials Left Dams Full For Weeks Even With Heavy Rains In The Forecast”

  1. The real reason for Germany’s flood disaster: A ‘monumental failure of the warning system’ | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
  2. John F Hultquist

    The dam folks thought the warnings were about “climate” change, not a change in “weather.”
    Confusing one for the other is never a good idea.

    1. Lyle

      You just did.

  3. Kdysi organizačně skvělé Německo se už propadlo tak hluboko jako Brusel. Příchod povodní byl znám dávno dopředu, ale neschopné úřady nechaly lidi utopit. - Reformy.cz

    […] Germany’s “Katrina”: Officials Left Dams Full For Weeks Even With Heavy Rains In T… […]

  4. William Astley

    This is criminal negligence causing death. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy.

    Logically the dams can only protect against a flood if each dam has reservoir space.

    There is no logical reason why water should not/could not be released, in this case weeks earlier, to create reservoir space to enable the dams to protect against extreme rainfall events.

    The extreme rainfall event was predicted and still no action has taken. This is not climate change.

  5. bonbon

    It is Maastricht, the Stability Pact, as Schroeder said already after the 2002 Elbe flood disaster, except this time around the EU Green New Deal must be pushed to save the banks.

    Let us see who will blow the whistle.

    Some layman, amateur, EU un-elected officials push this already for CO2 taxes, to save moribund zombie banks sitting on trillions of derivative nominal debt.

    With the COVID economic crash, I would say voter’s tolerance is all used up!

  6. Don B

    In 2011 the operators of Australia’s Wivenhoe dam allowed the dam to fill completely despite forecasts of extremely heavy rain. To prevent failure of the dam when the forecasted rain filled it to overflowing, water was dramatically released, flooding Brisbane and killing people.

    The class action lawsuit against the dam operators was successful.

    “The Court found that the plaintiff and group members suffered loss and damage as a result of the negligent operation of Wivenhoe and Somerset dams during the January 2011 flood in South East Queensland.”

    https://www.mauriceblackburn.com.au/class-actions/current-class-actions/queensland-floods-class-action/

    1. RoHa

      This was shortly after the very wonderful Tim Flannery had warned us that Man Made Climate Change meant Australia would be in permanent drought and our dams would never fill again.

      The same burst of rainy weather caused floods in other areas of Qld, as well as in NSW and Vic.

    2. TimiBoy

      You beat me to it!

      I spoke about this at the time to everyone I could find, it was clear we needed to move water out of Wivenhoe, but both political sides said essentially the same thing:

      “The science is settled, it will not rain.”

      Then it rained, we flooded, and the science was still settled. Go figure.

  7. “Shifts in weather patterns” – Newsfeed Hasslefree Allsort

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  8. drumphish

    Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

    Upstream dams can be the problem.

    The river that courses through the north end of my state flooded in 2011. A dam in Canada was filled to the brim, excess rainfall became too much to handle, the dam moved nineteen inches and failure looked possible. Sixty miles downstream where the land is flat, the river swelled to two miles wide. Water everywhere you go, rural roads washed away, flooded land for miles and miles.

    Dams were built to hold back water in case of a flood. The dams didn’t work, still had a flood that flooded the entire system all the way to Winnipeg.

    A river system mismanaged makes it worse when dams hold back even more water.

    If you have one bucket of water that is almost full and you pour in two more, the water has to go somewhere. It overflows the bucket, every time.

    Just too much water. Doesn’t matter the size of the bucket, dam-sized works too.

    The same thing happened in my home town, low lying areas that had been previously not developed were developed into housing. Brand new homes were under eight feet of water. For many years, nobody did anything with the land next to the river, fear of a flood was the reason.

    If you build there anyway, you might have a problem someday down the road.

    The river crested in late June, the water stayed for about four weeks.

    It was one huge mess. You clean it up, haul trash for months and takes years to recover.

    Houses flooded beyond repair, razed, new built. Some never recover, neighborhoods gone and not rebuilt. Thousands of people are impacted, suffering and misery happens, you see it happen, premature deaths in the local population occur. Very emotional, people breakdown, it is traumatic.

    The flood waters recede, it is then over, you move on.

    A gargantuan task for sure. Mistakes are made again. What is done should be done differently.

    The flood victims in Germany have my sympathy, it is one helpless feeling.

    Here, it was 95 degrees F today and the ground is dry. Rain is needed badly, and some does fall in a fifty mile long system dumping a couple of inches here and there.

    Some crops are shot, but other crops are doing okay for only about five inches of rain so far. The soil has moisture at about five inches deep. Have to water everything, otherwise, it will be bad. The soybeans might not fill the pods.

    Twenty miles south of my location, the small town there has had one inch of rain. It’ll be a disaster for hay and crops in that area. Grass fire danger is extreme, drought conditions prevail. Bluegrass grows a good five feet tall in good years, this year, it is dry with strands of bluegrass no more the six inches tall where it is in the yard, not much of it grows.

    It is dry in the pastures and hay land. No burning order, have to wait for winter and snow.

    To the north in Manitoba a grass fire burned 28,000 acres in early June, farms were evacuated.

    A lightning strike, fire for miles.

    Too little water can be disastrous, livestock are in peril out in the open.

    23,000,000 acres of planted cropland with very little rain on most of it spells economic disaster. You are going to be short of rain, some 150,000 gallons per acre not even there.

    The sun is to blame for the heatwave and the drought, nothing else.

  9. Kelly
  10. AC Osborn

    You won’t see this on the BBC or in the UK Newspapers.

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  15. ALLAN MACRAE

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/19/germanys-katrina-officials-left-dams-full-for-weeks-even-with-heavy-rains-in-the-forecast/#comment-3295295

    “Although the heavy rains had been forecast days in advance, nothing was done to avert the inevitable destruction. Instead of taking responsibility, politicians are blaming climate change in a bid to shift attention away from their incompetence and gross negligence.”

    There is another possibility – that failure to control the flooding was a deliberate act to promote climate change fear.

    Examine one recent parallel – the Covid-19 alleged pandemic and its many frauds, used to create widespread fear and stringent population control:

    Summary – from a public letter I sent to our Alberta government:

    The Alberta Government’s management of Covid-19 has been an incompetent, deadly disaster:
    1 There was no justification for the Covid-19 lockdown of under-65’s that started in March 2020 – the risk of Covid-19 death to 1Dec2020 for under-65’s was only 1 in 300,000.
    2 The harm done by the lockdowns exceeded the harm done by the Covid-19 illness by approximately 10 to 100 times.
    3 There was no increase in total deaths in Alberta or Canada to 30June2020 – no total death increase means NO deadly Covid-19 pandemic. Average age of death from Covid-19 in Alberta was 82.
    4 The PCR tests were not a suitable method for estimating Covid-19 cases or basing policy. The resulting policies were entirely wrong and destructive.
    5 There was no justification for the prevention of Covid-19 treatment with cheap, effective medicines like Ivermectin – as a result, lives were lost.
    6 There was no justification for the widespread promotion of dangerous, relatively ineffective, costly Covid-19 injections by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. These experimental injections are causing enormous harm to those who receive them, should never be given to under-18’s, and in the long term could kill or seriously injure more people than the Covid-19 illness.
    7 There is overwhelming evidence that the Covid-19 panic and lockdown was a politically-driven scam, and Alberta government officials were either fooled or deliberately collaborated with it – the government’s actions were either utterly incompetent or they were criminal.
    8 I first formally notified the Alberta government of these Covid-19 facts on 3Sept2020 (below), and published the correct path forward months earlier, on 21&22March2020.
    9 Alberta government officials “knew or should have known” that they were following a disastrous, destructive path as early as March 2020 and should have taken a completely different approach as summarized above, which would have saved billions of dollars and many lives.
    10 NOTICES OF LIABILITY have already been served on all members of the European Parliament. Based on evidence of serious harm, THE GOVERNMENT OF ALBERTA SHOULD IMMEDIATELY AND PERMANENTLY CEASE ALL COVID-19 INJECTIONS OF UNDER-18’S and should immediately cease all Covid-19 injections for all other Albertans pending an emergency safety review. The civil and criminal liability of all members of the Alberta Legislature, including all members of the Opposition who have failed to vigorously oppose these dangerous injections, is clear. All of you “knew or should have known” that you were mis-managing the Covid-19 response and causing great harm, and you are fully responsible for the enormous damage done to Alberta and Albertans.
    __________________________

    I suggest that if you’re going to have a real deadly pandemic, it’s got to kill people who would not have died anyway of other causes. While the authorities in New York State, England and a few other places did their best by returning infected Covid-19 patients to old folks homes to infect and kill other patients, it just was not enough. So they pumped up the death stats:

    In the USA, the coding for Covid-19 deaths was changed in March 2020.
    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/faulty_covid_death_numbers_explained.html

    Under the old coding, Covid-19 deaths were 1/16 of current reported totals, more like ~40,000 Covid deaths, not ~600,000. 40,000 flu deaths is a light flu year for the USA.

    I nailed this fraud early, by comparing per capita deaths in Alberta with those in the USA – my ratio was ~10 times too high for the USA vs the 16 reported above.

    The USA authorities’ Covid-19 stats are false and fraudulent. Huge numbers of deaths from other causes were falsely coded as Covid – 100% fraud.
    ___________________________

    Lowering of water levels is routine operational procedure in the two dams upstream of Calgary on the Bow and Elbow rivers, and it works well most years. An investigation should be launched to inquire why this was not done in Germany. Also, why were the populations not emergency-evacuated? This is also standard operating procedure.

    Like the global warming fraud and the Covid-19 lockdown fraud, this needless loss-of-life in Germany has a strong aroma of the barnyard.

    Scare the hell out of people and then get them to act against their own best interest – it worked for Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot – the great killers of the 20th Century.

    The 21st Century has produced a whole new crop of monsters and their pack-of-lies.

    1. Richard Greene

      MacCrae
      Many people would read your comment
      and dismiss you as a conspiracy theorist.

      But I’ve been following the COVID “epidemic”
      closely, and everything you have written
      makes sense.

      Concerning the German flooding:

      There are two possibilities:
      (1) Incompetence or
      (2) Deliberate malfeasance.

      Before 2020 I would have guessed incompetence.
      But starting in 2020, I would consider
      the possibility that this was deliberate.

      We know leftists never let a crisis go to waste
      in their effort to increase their political power.

      The crisis can be real or fake (such as the fake coming
      climate crisis, always coming, but it never shows up).

      We know leftist politicians will use
      the German flooding
      to further their “climate change” cause
      (climate change can only be stopped
      by more powerful governments and
      rule by leftist “experts”).

      We don’t know if any leftists deliberately
      ignored the risk, and let the flooding happen.
      It’s sad that we have to consider that possibility.

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  18. Richard Greene

    Must be nice to have “climate change” as an excuse for leadership failures.

    In the US, California does not do much forest maintenance, and then blames climate change when the usual forest fires are so intense they are very difficult to put out. President Trump pointed this out, but was severely criticized by the mass media, as he was every time he was correct.

  19. Germany’s “Katrina”: Officials Left Dams Full For Weeks Even With Heavy Rains In The Forecast. | The Truth is Where?

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  21. ALLAN MACRAE

    In 2013 Calgary and Southern Alberta experienced the most severe flooding in more than a century. This was the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history.

    The weather service provided adequate warning (~24 hours?) and emergency evacuation procedures were enacted. Only one person died in Calgary – an elderly woman who was missed in the evacuation.

    I had a Board of Directors meeting that day for a large homeless shelter. I placed my five-year-old daughter with friends on high ground, and phoned into the meeting from my condo on the Elbow River. At about 6:00pm I called an end to the meeting, because the water levels were rising quickly on the Bow and Elbow Rivers. Our excellent staff successfully evacuated our ~1200 homeless clients to alternative lodging, most from our main building on the Bow River. I drove up the parkade ramp as water started to trickle down from the flooded driveway, picked up my daughter and stayed with friends.

    After a few months and many billions of dollars in repairs, life in Southern Alberta returned to normal. Long term flood improvements have still not been constructed.

    One of my new friends, Lt Col David Redman, was Alberta’s emergency officer in charge of crisis management for the 2013 flood, and he did an excellent job. It is notable that he was NOT asked to manage the 2020 Covid-19 response, and instead it has been very poorly managed by our young Chief Medical Officer and the Kenney Cabinet.

    Similar incompetent management of Covid-19 has occurred in every province in Canada. As a result, Statistics Canada recently confirmed that the number of deaths from the ill-advised Covi-19 lockdown exceeded the number of deaths from the Covid-19 illness. The average age of death from Covid-19 in Alberta was ~82, and the average age from other causes due to the ill-advised lockdown was ~30. Years-of-life totaled over 25,000 in Alberta – multiply that by ~9 for all of Canada.

    Politicians gave themselves “Attaboys all around! ”. Most of the mainstream press lauded the politicians’ blatant bullsh!t. More Attaboys!

  22. Craig
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