How the Ahr Valley Flood Failure demonstrated the Deficits that our Global Addressing of Problems also has
We globally fail to see and react towards the 15+ wicked problems and the mechanisms behind that are mostly the same as around the Ahr valley flood. What unfolded quickly in the case of the flood is unfolding more slowly on a global level regarding these 15+ wicked problems of which global warming with floods/droughts/earthquakes and other disasters is only one category. The mechanisms to diagnose and resolve the issues are also not in place on a global level, not even in the richer Western World.
1. From July 14 to 15, 2021 the entire Ahr valley in Germany with many thousands of inhabitants was flooded — hundreds of houses were washed away. 189 deaths, 2 missing a year later (probably washed into the ocean), ~29 billion Euro damage, 487 houses were destroyed. Around 20 000 people were affected.
2. First indications of the flood were visible 5 days before, but just scientists looked at this and sent some general e-mails as EFAS to some general flooded and spammed addresses of German national weather authorities which were mostly not considered there. It was clear that soils were moist and that steep slopes and little soils that were easily washed away would create the perfect flood.
3. All involved people couldn’t believe that a big flood would actually materialize. In many previous cases it had not happened as bad as the prognosis was: “The coffee is not drunk as hot as it is boiled.” (German: Der Kaffee wird nicht so heiß getrunken wie er gekocht wird.)
4. The national weather authority only gave out a general warning in the afternoon before the big flood when it was already mostly too late for evacuations. Their content was the number of millimeters of rain to expect. The people not versed in numbers did not know how to interpret this. It was not clear that hundreds of human lives were at risk and thousands of people should be evacuated — and where exactly.
5. Authorities did not invest the few hundred-thousand Euros to create prognoses about the height of rivers. It would just have been another predictive analytics system like thousands of others. The 3D landscape data and precipitation prognosis data was available.
6. Authorities also saved a few thousand Euros by de-installing sirens. Instead, one politician held a vague Facebook speech in which he said that people might even consider evacuating but only as most extreme option and not very seriously — reaching around 10 people this way instead of reaching a million with sirens.
7. Also the money for helicopters was cut, only one helicopter was left and for that one, the rescue winch had been cut — financially and literally. The army and air force said that for them it seemed too dangerous to fly in rainy weather. A private helicopter flew and took pictures and made videos. But crisis management teams did not respond to it. Later, the same air force said they would not evacuate people from Afghanistan because they are not convinced that the airport security and fire fighters there are optimally equipped. The air force only had 2–3 working helicopters and no motivated pilots anymore. At the same time, vaccine, test, mask and military equipment producers were allowed to make billions per year in additional unjustified profit.
8. For some villages, the height of river levels got estimated, but those estimates were 2x as high as the “century flood” just a few years ago and nobody believed it (thinking of a typo or a joke).
9. Later it turned out that that a county administrator officially would have had to decide on the state of emergency and associated media warnings, sirens, warning app messages and evacuations. But he was first ignorant, then in disbelief and then found it most important to bring his expensive car into a safe space. Only after all of this around midnight, did he give an alarm after already many people had died.
10. Several ministers (of 2 states) were on vacation, did not have a crisis management team and competence tussles with other ministers and authorities, so nothing was done there. In one case, the “experts” were only called together weeks later.
11. Several emergency teams were only accommodated in garages where they had bad or no mobile phone reception and thus didn’t even get the news in time.
12. Alarm numbers were not known or not used. People were on vacation, did not get informed, were incompetent or in disbelief. Nobody wanted to be responsible for the consequences of an evacuation action.
13. Even the radio and TV news were not properly informed and did not understand the seriousness of the event and thus did not ask people to evacuate.
14. Generally, politics had given out the premise to not frighten citizens, especially as a consequence of terrorist attack situations (dozens of Islamist /ISIS terror attacks), the COVID pandemics and vaccinations.
15. NGOs postulated a subordination principle by themselves to be able to keep half of the money and said there may be tax issues, especially if paying more than €5k, especially if the recipients might not be in need of help. The finance ministry could easily create a ruling, but they prefer to create jobs for their lawyer friends and more employee positions by not doing so.
16. Only special insurance contracts against natural hazards would in principle pay. However, they tried to reject as many claims as possible and for the other cases were only willing to pay much less than the cheapest craftsman. Then hyper-inflation in 2021/22 and lack of materials and craftsmen made costs rise every week.
17. Gigantic bureaucracy for victims when asking for help, making the forms very complex so that money can easily be rejected and lucrative work is created for lawyer friends.
18. No politicians took responsibility, they only internally tried to optimize how their laziness and incompetence could be hidden from the public, which false narratives to launch.
19. No politician took an active role in trying to help after the flood: The affected people were just left alone to wait until private insurances possibly helped them, to then later after a few years maybe get state aid if insurances would not have paid. Instead politicians were caught cracking jokes and laughing about the poor victims.
20. Local fire fighters mostly had no boats and no education to carry out water flowing water rescue. 19 people were rescued with a private inflatable plastic fun boat in Mechernich as the only available means for rescuing.
21. 2016 there had already been a previous flood called “flood of the century”: Due to this false narrative, people didn’t believe that an even worse flood would come only 5 years later and they didn’t believe the water height prognoses made — if at all. Other big floods had happened 1804 and 1910.
22. The flood had arrived within minutes in many villages and cities.
23. Endangered land property became worthless and thus people could not earn money by selling it.
24. One cubic meter of water weighs 1 ton and exerts a corresponding pressure on buildings and much more if it carries heavy things like big cars or parts of buildings or trees. The valleys in the region were created by exactly that water force.
25. Therefore, authorities should be very careful which buildings they accept to be built which later can be in the way of the water. Additionally, those buildings make the water level rise even further. Concerns of office clerks can be removed with bribery money, but then also the house debris and corpses will later have to be removed. In the end, nature’s laws have to be respected, no matter how much bribery goes on.
26. Experts estimate that it will require a decade or more to rebuild everything, ideally climate-friendly and more resistant.
27. Immediate help of ~2400 € was just sufficient to buy new clothing. Even a year later, many people had not received more.
28. Thousands of volunteers had helped because before, during and after the flood all authorities had been failing continuously. When they worked, authorities and insurances demanded from people papers that were washed away and then rejected help on that basis.
29. Mold had spread everywhere, just like heartlessness, bureaucracy and corruption in politics and administration.
30. Due to the slow work progress, there was and will be construction noise heard each day in the region, making it difficult for people to recover and relax and reminding them each minute of what had happened.
31. “Responsibility diffusion” was the euphemism coined to describe the continuous failure of all public authorities, insurances and politicians: Wiping out hundreds of human lives, destroying thousands of lives and wasting dozens of billions of money.
32. The German authority digital radio BOS — specifically designed also for such crisis situations — which had cost €8 billion to build and hundreds of millions to maintain each year had failed completely. It turned out to effectively be a cheaply made solution to maximize profits for the involved companies. Therefore, many of its masks just had batteries that would last for 4–6 hours in emergencies and the communication was dependent on German Telecom’s infrastructure. Some of that infrastructure had been affected by the floods: Cables and some ~34 switching centers had failed and thus eliminated the communication in the entire region. Press investigations about this were rejected with the excuse that all its technology was secret.
33. This shows how our society is dumbing down: Drumming or fire signs or other forms of Morse codes would have helped more than that latest shit of digital BOS radio — and that at lower costs. But people had lost the skills to communicate in such ways.
34. Even 5 days after the first EFAS warnings, Anne Spiegel’s ministry (Rhineland) gave out a press release that no flood was to be expected. She then later did not show any remorse or interest in helping others, just in helping herself to avoid a PR disaster, create new false narratives or somehow put her failure into context.
35. At 11:09 pm in the flood night, authorities gave a first evacuation order, but only in 50m distance of the Ahr, but already more than 1 km around the Ahr, people got washed away and were dying.
36. Politicians in charge of such disasters went into restaurants in the night of the disaster when rivers were up from normally 40 cm to 8 m. 250 m away from the river, a dozen handicapped people dies as a result and that is just one example. One even visited a little-informed disaster team in a garage with bad mobile reception and then just went home without taking actions.
37. Firefighters were sent into death because they didn’t get sufficient information about the real dangers and didn’t have the required equipment.
38. Only one running water rescuer was working that night and no helicopter with a rescue winch. Another helicopter could just take and send video footage, but nobody reacted upon that.
39. Politicians of all major parties had failed, so it was no longer usable for party politics and they decided to just ignore the flood victims, especially since they had no more money to bribe them and also otherwise had no voice and no lobby.
40. Insurances are and were not willing to insure the obviously endangered houses or companies. (Class 4 is not insurable). Even if insured, many details are not insured, like a Swiss cheese: Maximal rip-off to get maximal insurance fees but having to pay minimally as insurance.
41. Politicians are discussing mandatory insurance against floods instead of the state taking care of it and not allowing to build houses in endangered spaces near the rivers.
42. People spent horror nights on the roofs of their houses: Many can’t stand hearing flowing water anymore, even if just under the shower. During those nights they did not know if their houses would withstand the floods when over and over again big cars, trees or big parts of other houses crashed into their houses and nobody helped them.
43. The peak of the water level in Altenburg was 10.80 m with normally 40 cm water depth.
44. Just a few dozen houses were not allowed to be rebuilt even though thousands were completely damaged and had been flooded. Experts said it would be better to rebuild them in much higher locations only.
45. 9 months after the flood, 3 applicants in Rhineland were fully paid out of thousands.
46. The county was about to close the collection point for relief supplies because they said the personnel costs were too high.
47. That “smart” county was also supposed to create a flood prevention plan for the entire region. With which experts?
48. It was like telling a seriously injured person, “If you don’t call an emergency doctor, it’s your own fault”.
49. Where progress in re-building was made, people had gotten around €2.4k, sometimes up to €5k and invested ~€500k of their own money, e.g. a camping site operator.
50. Politicians lied one year later and were claiming to have solved and paid > 80% of cases in Rhineland and >= 95% of cases in NRW.
51. Politicians with the help of the police tried to transfer the blame to voluntary helpers like volunteer fire fighters. They were investigating who gave them orders when the people who could have done that were having business dinners, were sleeping or were on vacation. They tricked them into these investigations by telling them they only wanted to hear them as witnesses. Then they shifted their attention on trying to find details that they might have done wrong to take the responsibility off of politicians. This while these courageous fire fighters risked and lost their lives and could — in contrast to some politicians — not save their belongings because they starting working immediately to save people as well as they could. Elsewhere, e.g. in New York after 9/11/2001 such fire fighters are considered heroes and get financially compensated favorably for risking their lives and saving lives, but not in corrupt Germany with its blame culture.
52. Elsewhere: Neighbors rejected flood protection measures (due to noise, dust, worse view, possibly a bit more tax) and buildings and thus everybody was flooded.
53. The only positive for many was the compassion and practical help of many volunteers — without whom hardly anything would have happened in the disaster region.
54. One year after the flood
a. ~1.2 billion € were paid out of ~29 billion of total damage.
b. No protection concept had been created.
c. New heavy rains or floods would lead to the same disaster.
d. Many streets were not yet tarred.
e. Many couldn’t sleep well and got woken up by the bits of construction work starting at 6 am of each work day.
f. Many had psychological issues but no therapy.
g. Hardly any (sports) club had gotten help, even if just small amounts would have helped greatly in making them the middle of social life and psychological healing again.
h. Also train tracks were not yet reconstructed yet, so no tourists or helpers could come and bring business by train.
i. Many people were still indulged in paper warfare with hard-hearted authorities and insurances while others had already given up.
j. As a result, many people had to work outside the region (companies were also destroyed and the region had always been economically weak) with car trunks full of file folders with paper work to take up all their spare time.
k. Media was amplifying their propaganda that the population should be more confident and hardworking and try to rebuild better — even if not getting noteworthy help.
l. The total height of the flood is not officially known in most places because the heights were beyond the scales and everybody gave a shit to find out the heights from the water lines of the houses to create better prognoses next time.
m. Politicians are still putting much more effort into gendering language than helping people e.g. with minimizing the consequences of natural disasters.
n. Political bigwigs arrived at a luxury dinner in the middle of the disaster site in a large caravan of luxury limousines costing large sums to say some warm words or just plain lies instead of helping.
One year after the German Ahr valley flood, only a. ~1.2 billion € were paid out of ~29 billion of total damage. If authority officials together with insurance representatives and experts had went through this relatively small region and were willing to sleep for a change in a 4 star instead of the usual 5 star hotels (which were washed away), they could have settled this within a few months. They could have diagnosed each building directly and made an immediate decision, just with a few notes and inspecting the reality personally has much less fraud potential. But to do that is a too big ask for these people and it is also the type of pragmatism that makes the difference between today’s times and those in which the economy grew quickly.
Summary of the Ahr valley flood: No help from politics, 282 million donations received, half of the donations left on the accounts of aid organizations, no help with craftsman (no additional payment, no tax relief, no organization by politics — also victims of supply chain disruptions and COVID-19). Several people killed themselves after the catastrophe. Politics could have organized a team of experts to go from house to house, assess damage and grant payments and coordinate other help. They could have created financial and tax incentives for victims, helpers and craftsmen and organized psychological help, e.g. for the many children who don’t speak anymore because they saw a parent drown or people dying or corpses hanging in trees. In the end, all German authorities failed very badly and just did the bare minimum or less.
Also the failure of startup funding and thus of the economic future is very similar and in the responsibility of many of the same authorities. That received no attention since it is not that obvious and the affected people are easily belittled as freaks.