To our German friends. Are any of you affected by that flooding? I saw some of the videos and holy shit what a mess.
Not so far, fortunately. But I am watching the weather maps closely.
Let me ask you a question, but it is still really related to the topic. Do you have any organization whose job it is to maintain the rivers and streams over there? I ask because years ago we used to have a national network of county river authorities whose sole job was to keep rivers and ditches dredged, free from weed build up, and they used the dredged silt to build up the river banks. This served two purposes ensured the rivers were kept fast flowing, and higher banks meant they also had a greater flood capacity. Sometime around the late 1960's or 1970's these were disbanded and since then we have many bad floods which also means that now many people living in these areas are now, in many cases, trapped as they are both unable to sell their homes and cannot get any insurance cover.
So I was just wondering if that could be a contributory factor in the severity of the floods we have seen on the news?
Here in Germany we call this water protection conversation (Gewässerschutz). This is a task of the municipality, at least here in Baden-Württemberg. The municipality is responsible for keeping brooks and river courses free and not overgrown, for example. It is also responsible for flood protection control (Hochwasserschutz), which is subsidised by state and federal funds. Unfortunately, it is also the case that such issues as flood protection do not usually win any laurels in politics, which is why often enough something is only done when a disaster has occurred. There are also regulations here about where you can build your house, for example, which is then called a development plan. But this development plan is also the result of a political decision in the local council and often enough not the result of a rational decision. Such wrong decisions or misjudgements usually do not take revenge immediately, but only after years.
In my opinion, the floods in the Eifel are also the result of a chain of such decisions. The extreme weather then showed what can happen. And it is not only limited to the Eifel. In the southeast of Bavaria (Berchtesgardener Land) there were also drastic floods with several deaths and injuries.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
That sounds about as much of a mess as it is over here.
We have "watershed supervisory boards" meant to address those issues.
However, in the end, each board member is free to control their infrastructure however they see fit, and do not have to follow the recommendation of the board.
Not only that, but the board membership has devolved over time. The boards used to have representation from the political jurisdictions of towns, provinces, etc. The infrastructure got privatised over time. Along with that, the board membership became the owners of the power generating stations and such.
Now we have board members that are not accountable and who have the single goal of making money in a position of looking out for Joe public.
How is that working out? We have major floods on the Ottawa river in 2017 and 2019. The only reason there have not been floods since 2019 is that we have drought conditions and less winter snow pack; it has nothing to do with lessons learned from those floods.
That being said, I have seen what flooding does and the impact on people. Take care of one another, and keep safe. It will take a couple of years for those areas to get back to some semblance of normal.