News Severe flooding in Central Europe

[Urwumpe]

Still flooded... in Fischbeck (next to Tangermünde), the German army is now resorting to rather desperate measures to close to 50m gap in the levee, after many futile attempts to place big sand bags into the opening for closing it (the sandbags had just been washed way by the unbelievable flow): The new plan is to sink two river freighters in the opening and further fix them in place with concrete tank barriers. They are already transporting the freighters to the place and prepare them with explosives. It is not even known if this will work, but all other attempts to close the gap failed. (I can already see Michael Bay flying eastwards for inspiration)

Where the Saale flows into the Elbe, the army engineers destroyed an intact levee for letting the water from the flooded land behind the levee flow in the Saale faster. Here the situation is already relaxing, but still not nice.

The good news part I: the weather will get hot-hot-hot next week and evaporation rates will increase a lot. Bad news: This will mean the fine mud from the river will turn into clayware and make it nearly impossible to clean it.

Good news part II: The emergency coordination map done by volunteers in cooperation with the city of Magdeburg has now been turned into a charity map, showing where charity events take place for raising money for the victims of the flood.

 

[N_Molson]

We had an horrible month of May in France. Floodings were beginning to happen at the end of the month, then the weather went in "summer mode" right on time, water stayed in the rivers and dams held the flow except in a few places, and damage is limited. Since the beginning of June, we have a nice nominal summer situation, at least over the South of France, the North still get showers, but nothing continuous that can lead to floodings. We were rather lucky I think.

 

[Urwumpe]

Sinking the barges into the 90m gap has worked! There is now only a 20 m gap left, which they want to close by sinking another barge there. It is the first time that such an operation has been attempted, and it worked. Through this gap, 300 m³/s flowed before it was reduced (For BBC fans: Enough to fill a supertanker in less than an hour).

According to the pictures with some lot of explosives, there had been some metal parts flying through the air.

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/fischbeck-versenkte-lastkaehne-sollen-die-flut-bremsen-a-905943.html

 

[Urwumpe]

While the flooding is practically over now, the damages are going to be an issue here in the region for the next months. Wolfsburg is still disconnected from the high-speed railway traffic because the tracks at the Elbe are still soaked with water and will be so at least until September. We have quite a number of workers who used to travel everyday from Berlin to Wolfsburg, who now have a big problem (usually you travel 60 minutes from Berlin to Wolfsburg, now it is 2-3 hours). To solve this, Wolfsburg plans to create a temporary home for the workers in former barracks. The news currently do not explain which barracks they mean,but the only still existing one is my former army base, the Hammerstein barracks (which are now an industrial park, but the company buildings are still unused).