Deutsche-Welle: Report on Germany’s Flood Catastrophe

July 17, 2021

“..clearly related to Climate change..”

Some clarity on those astounding pictures.

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week

6 Comments »

6 Responses to “Deutsche-Welle: Report on Germany’s Flood Catastrophe”

rhymeswithgoalie Says:

July 17, 2021 at 11:12 pm
I foresee a lot of building code changes in a lot of places.
😦

Reply
- greenman3610 Says:
  
  July 18, 2021 at 11:33 am
  I’ve spent thousands upgrading my rain gutters to handle the increased heavy events. It worked, but multiply that by millions – and that’s the easy stuff.
  
  Reply
  - socio Says:
    
    July 21, 2021 at 6:10 am
    There was an article on a Dutch news site a couple of days ago that mentioned the climate models didn’t include these type of stuck weather patterns which caused the floods, since they didn’t expect them to occur until the second half of the century, probably the end of the century.
    
    @greenman3610, you posted your first video’s of Jeniffer Francis around 2012 I think, which were very insightful. She discussed these mechanisms back then, pointing to the changes in the jet stream. I still share these occasionally.
    
    Reply
    - rhymeswithgoalie Says:
      
      July 21, 2021 at 9:21 am
      I share those Jennifer Francis videos, too.
      
      I’ve told my family “we broke the jet stream” so often that now they say it to me in expectation that I was about to say it again.
      
      Reply
socio Says:

July 21, 2021 at 5:58 am
I live next to these affected areas, and I can tell you that the scale of these events and talking about building code just don’t match. @greenman3610, I’m glad you imply this isn’t the conversation we should be having.

It you consider the geography of the area, and the fact that people historically live in valleys, you realise there is no easy solution. Water is very difficult to contain and there isn’t always an engineering fix available.

In this case the geography makes it hard. You also saw it with the winter flooding in England in 2013, where you had the problem of water flowing underground, just because of the types of rock formations in some parts of the country. In Limburg, in The Netherlands, where you had flooding last week, you don’t have rock formations but a lot of sand as part of the soil, which makes certain solutions harder to pull off.

These events are of a different scale.

Reply
- rhymeswithgoalie Says:
  
  July 21, 2021 at 9:31 am
  A lot of the flooding is aggravated by both recent and long-term changes to terrain, including filling in marshland to build on it, clearing land upstream (and paving a lot of it), channeling rivers that naturally meandered, etc. A lot of it was done even after people learned better, but the politicians or permitting officials pocketed their bribes, the developers made their money, and people bought houses in a “neighborhood” that was wetlands a few years earlier.
  
  Reply