Europe floods: At least 120 dead and hundreds unaccounted for | Hacker News Reader

Europe floods: At least 120 dead and hundreds unaccounted for

bbc.com

78 pointsbaybal229 comments

The thing that was most disturbing was just how quickly the water rose. The Ahr, typically 10-15 ft wide and maybe about a feet deep, just enough to cool a beer crate during hot summer, went up to something like 23ft. I was joking with my mum on the phone late afternoon when they told me our camper got towed uphill as a precautionary measure. Not 2h later they had to be evacuated and the whole campsite was gone, as in does not exist anymore.

Wasn't it similar in 2015 or 2016, can't remember anymore, when Müsch was under water and Herschbroich seen water coming? 2012 seen Ditscheid flooding and that is 400+ meters above the see level. That was just one day of very heavy rain.

What really gets me about the situation in that region is that when driving along the L257, between the road and tops to the right, direction Adenau, it's clearly visible that these plains are flood plains. Who allows to build there? It's the same in Monschau. On the other side of the bridge across the old town, there were new houses built maybe a meter higher than the river.

Just goes to show that the idea of climate change affecting everywhere equally (and thus meekly) is the biggest blind spot of climate change deniers.

More than ever, I keep reading about how hyperlocal water systems are, and IMHO it shouldn't come as a surprise anymore that the way we're going to experience the effects of climate change is in the form of more extreme versions of the things each region already had before (be it droughts, rain, heat waves or cold waves)

I worry that this framing tends to exempt the authorities from responsibility. The article talks a lot about the raw effect of the flooding, a lot about high-level climate goals, and barely at all about how governments should tackle the problems they're facing today. It does quote a professor who says the tragedy "should have been avoided" because "the warnings were not taken seriously enough and preparations were inadequate", but shouldn't the biggest question here be how they were inadequate and which additional preparations ought to have happened? Surely there's gotta be action items beyond just renewing our commitment to reducing emissions.

Yeah, I take issue with the idea that carbon offsets alone will magically fix everything.

In Toronto, there was a mandate a few years ago for all houses to disconnect downspouts from the sewer system (so that rainwater is absorbed into the ground of the sprawling suburbs instead of overloading the city plumbing system. They've also been building gigantic water reservoirs by the lake in anticipation of increased pressure in said plumbing systems.

I think at this point, it sounds like the people saying we're already too late are not really being alarmist, and that we are going to need to pay that price in the form of lots of infrastructure projects to deal with things like extreme floods. The scary thing IMHO is Germany clearly invested in such infrastructure[0] and yet here we are.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8

We are likely to have to tackle both climate change (warming), and mitigation. It's just that nobody has the authority and resources for it, before calamity strikes.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound defeatist, I meant "we're too late" in the sense that the damages are already here, so now we're not merely talking about just the cost of prevention anymore, but also about the cost of a cure on top of it.

Yeah, I modified my response. I think we both agree measures will be reactive in regards extremes.

It also shows that we have paved over too much soil. Cities hardly have any ability to soak up extra water. Whenever I walk outside in a stronger rain and I see the torrents of water gushing over the hard surfaces directly to the closest gutter, I can't help but think that our ancestors would judge us pretty harshly for treating rainwater like nuisance and not a resource to manage wisely.

It wouldn't have helped in this case, though. No clever water retention system can cope with such a downpour. Maaaaybe it could mitigate the worst results.

Not sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_basin These seem to be feasible though.

> I can't help but think that our ancestors would judge us pretty harshly for treating rainwater like nuisance and not a resource to manage wisely.

Also considering that many cities are like wind channels...

Less paving is not changing a thing when your village is in a valley downstream of a dam that overflows from massive rain over the mountains.

The association of these floods purely with climate change seems like a stretch to me. Storms cause floods all the time and once in a century is pretty standard.

Most of these precede industrialization and were caused by storms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_Europe

Nobody is arguing its "purely" caused by climate change but it seems pretty clear that climate change is making all of these things happen more frequently and intensely than they used to.

> Nobody is arguing its "purely" caused by climate change

The article definitely takes that position, at least implicitly. Half of the text is about climate change.

> Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.

Do you see anything wrong with that statement? Seems pretty accurate to me...

Yes, that single sentence is definitely accurate. The rest of the article assumes that it's unquestionably true.

Do you have the numbers to back that up?

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affect... is a decent place to start looking

It's not purely associated w/ it, the article says as much:

> Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely

To make an argument that climate change isn't a factor, I'd imagine one would need to look at the expected frequency of getting record breaking floods, fires and other extreme events worldwide simultaneously.

The rest of the article ignores that statement.

> To make an argument that climate change isn't a factor, I'd imagine one would need to look at the expected frequency of getting record breaking floods, fires and other extreme events worldwide simultaneously.

You have it backwards. To prove that climate change is a factor, you need to do these things. Storms causing floods that kill people precede industrialization.

No, to say that climate change is a factor, you just need a non-zero correlation between climate change and any of these events (i.e. even if it only causes a 0.1% increase in weather variability and that contributes to an increase of only 5M galons of water in a flood, it is still a factor). And peer reviewed studies are plenty and they do support the idea that a strong correlation does exist across many types of extreme weather events.

If you want to argue that carbon offsets don't have as much direct impact on specific problems (floods, fires, whatever), sure, that's a valid question about resource prioritization, but the theme I keep hearing is that these things keep getting worse year after year and that in a lot of cases it's no longer at a scale small enough for infrastructure projects to even be feasible anymore.

It’s interesting that this is the fourth "once in a century" flood in Germany since 2000.

That’s where climate change comes in: In the past, we had one "once in a century" flood per century.

Does "once in a century" have any scientific meaning? Because if you look at the link, far more people died in the past from flooding. 10,000 per flood vs. 100 today.

Whether that is because the floods were larger or because we had less robust engineering is unknown.

Another explanation for lower casualties is modern communications. How did people in the past know to evacuate prior to modern meteorology and real-time communications? Had there been less warning of this event, the #s dead may well have been in the thousands.

Indeed. One commenter below mentioned family getting evacuated in anticipation.

Also worth noting this event is still ongoing, so the "at least 120" number is likely lowballing.

I think it does. Insurance companies use it to calculate the monthly payments. I am sure they are well quantized.

Unfair comparison. The large ones of those (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_Europe) all were flooding of coastal areas by sea water.

This is flooding by rainwater in mountainous regions.

There was also “once in the century” in Poland, in 1997…

no noo, it was once in a millenium flood! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Central_European_flood ... Poland was mostly hit because of brilliant idea to build in the flood plains. Image in that wiki article from Kozanow. Here in 2010 again

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozan%C3%B3w#/media/Plik:Powod...

"This area was treated - also due to the fact that it is located in a depression - as a floodplain in the event of catastrophic floods that sometimes occur here, caused by the flooded waters of the Odra or Ślęza, flowing not far west of Kozanów. The decision to build up Kozanów with tall apartment blocks [14] made of prefabricated slabs turned out to be fateful. After twenty years, the catastrophic flood of the millennium of 1997 flooded Kozanów and its vicinity [15]. The estate was the most disadvantaged area of the city, the water was reaching the first floor in some places. During the 2010 flood on May 22, Kozanów was partially flooded again."

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