Germany, Belgium floods: at least 100 dead, more than 1,000 missing

More than 1,000 people were missing and more houses were destroyed in flood-stricken regions in western Germany and Belgium on Friday where further flooding was feared with the death toll already over 100.

Entire communities lay in ruins after swollen rivers swept through towns and villages in the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, Belgium and the Netherlands.

“It was terrible not to able to help the people. They were waving at us out of the windows. Houses were collapsing to the left and right of them and in the house between they were waving,” Frank Thel, a resident of Schuld, told Reuters in front of a pile of rubble in the town, where several buildings had collapsed. “We were lucky, we survived,” he said.

In Germany alone, more than 90 people have died in what is the country’s worst mass loss of life in years. That number was feared to rise further as more houses collapsed, while in Belgium media said the death toll was at least 14.

“The water had such enormous power! We were in the house, it blew the door open and I was thrown against the chimney- stove. That’s how much pressure the water had when filling the house,” Thel said of the shock in the night that changed everything for them.

“It just went so fast. We just couldn’t save anything. The water came so fast, I’ve never seen anything like that. We were on the bridge down there and I thought, this might be getting tight, and then it was over, the water rose and rose continually, and I realized, it’s useless now to try save anything. Car, gone, all gone, digger, gone, it was all gone.”

The Infrastructure has been destroyed completely, roads washed away, the sanitation system submerged and phone and internet networks are either completely down or instable, meaning lots of people cant be traced or accounted for.

“Here in Schuld the question today is: What can be cleared here now? Can we restore roads? Bridges have collapsed, making areas difficult to access. The infrastructure with water, electricity and the sanitation supply etc is difficult. We have to rebuild them. This has already happened here in Schuld. Downstream in Insul, people had to be evacuated yesterday and we still have to rebuild the infrastructure there,” firefighter Andreas Solheid, of the fire-fighter association of Adenau municipalities said.

In the neighbouring Ahrweiler district in North Rhine-Westphalia, around 1,300 people were missing the district government said on Facebook.

Mobile phone networks have collapsed in some of the flood-stricken regions, which means that family and friends are unable to track down their loved ones.

Further north, in Erftstadt near Cologne, several houses collapsed on Friday morning, and rescue crews were struggling to reach residents by boat. Roads around the town Erftstadt were impassable as they were washed out in the floods.

It was not clear whether there were any casualties as rescuers had to rely on walkie-talkies to relay information.

One dam close to the Belgian border, the Rurtalsperre, flooded, while another, the Steinbachtalsperre, was stabilised early on Friday. Some 4,500 people have been evacuated from communities downstream, and a stretch of the A61 motorway has been closed amid fears of a breach.