Reposted from the NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin on 17. July 2021
Harsh criticism of German authorities failing to act is mounting in the aftermath of the recent deadly floods.
Germany’s New Orleans
Many of the over one hundred people died in the recent flood disaster in Central Western Germany could have been prevented – had the responsible institutions heeded the warnings that had been already issued days in advance by the weather services. Authorities had been warned days early, yet they did nothing to prepare to evacuate and mobilize resources. The media did nothing to warn.
Veteran meteorologist: “much could have been prevented”
Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann told in a PULS 24 interview that “much of it could have been prevented” and that “people could have been warned”.
“The rainfall could not have been prevented” but the authorities and the “media could have warned the population.” The veteran Swiss meteorologist is surprised by the “surprise of the authorities” and says “people could have been evacuated or at least items moved to higher floors”.
“Let people drown” as “they broadcast shit”
Kachelman also commented to Germany’s leading national daily, Bild: “It hurts when the very people who would have the resources to accompany such a weather situation 24/7 do nothing to save lives. But they broadcast shit and let people drown.”
Unpreparedness becoming a German habit
Publicist Roland Tichy at tichyseinblick.de commented on what seems to be a state of permanent paralysis among the authorities: “Those who blame the flood disaster on the climate are arguing cynically: It is a matter of concrete responsibility and concrete measures and solutions. And so every weather hits Germany unprepared.”
Warnings already days in advance
Online FOCUS magazine here reported authorities claimed the flood came suddenly, and so it was impossible to prepare. Bur Jan Schenk from “The Weather Channel” told FOCUS that warnings began to appear already late last week:
Already on Friday, a heavy precipitation event was announced in western Germany. The weather models swung so strongly that one could already speak of severe weather due to heavy rain. By Monday at the latest, it must have been clear to everyone that there would be flooding in western Germany.”
“Monumental system failure”
FOCUS added:
The European EFAS flood warning system had even issued a warning of ‘extreme flooding.’ The fact that so many people still had to die was ‘a monumental system failure,’ British hydrologist Hannah Cloke, an EU Commission adviser on EFAS, told the political magazine Politico.”
Belgium and the Netherlands both evacuated citizens.
Climate change to deflect attention from failure
Meanwhile science editor Axel Bojanowski at “Welt” commented on claims that the flood was caused by German CO2 emissions: “The climate argument is used by politicians to deflect attention from their own responsibility for a disaster. Records show flash floods are less dangerous than before despite climate change.”
Building in a natural flood zone!
Another suspected problem not getting the needed attention is reckless planning and zoning. At Twitter, Stefan S. astutely noted that the hard hit town of Altenau in Rhineland Palatinate appears to have been built on an area that is a natural flood area of the Ahr River, satellite photos suggest:
Ich wüsste zu gerne was #Geologen in diesem Bild sehen! Als Laie würde ich behaupten, man hat in einem Flussbett bzw. in einem alten Überschwemmungsgebiet, gebaut. pic.twitter.com/NxL0QwfWWZ
— Stefan S. (@StefanSkibbe) July 15, 2021
Germany becoming increasingly paved over
Another major factor contributing to flash flooding is the amount of Germany’s surface area that is made impervious (paved over). A total of 19,743 km² (5.5%) of the country’s surface area is paved.
The recent German floods turned out to be where Germany is the most paved over, as the following chart shows. The colors shows the degree to which the surface is paved over:
Source: Leibnitz Institute
Deadliest floods occurred before 1980
Finally, climate alarmists like insisting that flooding today is far worse than before CO2 emissions reached higher levels (350+ppm). But of course this is nonsense. The 30 most deadly floods in the last 1000 years all occurred before 1980:
Top 30 deadliest floods in the last 1000 years:
Only all 30 of them occured before 1980.
Climate Change is REAL!
— 𝔻𝕒𝕨𝕟𝕋𝕁𝟡𝟘™ (@DawnTJ90) July 16, 2021
Also read: Hamburg’s disasters early warning debacle.
Expecting griff in 3, 2, 1
Antagonism is a tool alarmists often use to avoid objective debate.
He is a glutton for punishment.
Nope he is just a stupid troll .. he never discusses anything just posts propaganda
Well, for a “stupid troll” he’s pretty effective.
Even without doing ANYTHING, he is managing to disrupt this thread and deviate from discussing the subject of the thread.
If he is getting paid, it’s fair to assume that he gets a bonus for hijacking threads without even posting.
Are you dumbies going to carry on his work when he’s NOT HERE ? Do you hate him that much.
Get a life and how about discussing the deaths and flooding instead of a non existent “troll”, you are proxy trolling FOR.
Exactly. Almost all of us already know the common sense point: don’t feed the trolls.
But it seems we can’t help ourselves as most wuwt threads inevitably end up centering on .. griff. Sad.
Lee, go easy on Griff. He’s paid to spew this nonsense so he has to show up. We all gotta eat, after all, even paid trolls and “climate scientists”.
Quit repeating yourself!!
Griff has his uses. He brings all the alarmist narratives to the discussion, and this gives the skeptics the opportunity to tear his CO2/Climate Change claims and arguments apart, and this benefits lurkers who come here and are looking for answers.
It’s all good. 🙂
Parallel to Governor Cuomo sending COVID cases to nursing homes? The more people who die, the more support there is for the narrative.
Or Hanlon’s Razor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
The BBC certainly milked the German event for all its worth,
The Fake news factory always will, and Harrabin who has no qualifications at all in “science” drew himself into one of his severest ..w..nkatron moments of the last 2 years.
Yep he’s the one milking the German event, the one I detest the most is matt magrath, he even won a reward of the greenies of 100000 notes for best reporting on climate change.
Let us not forget Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) corollary;
“If one wants to achieve unstated goals with malice, one should first appear to be lazy and/or incompetent, lest they be accused of acting with malice.”
When it’s today, and an isolated weather attempt occurs it is ‘climate change’
When it is July 22nd 1342, when an isolated weather event occurred that flooded the same area to an even greater depth with more loss of life, no one even mentions it.
Yes. The same rainfall patterns keep happening in central Europe fairly regularly…just location changes….Paris Seine valley one decade, Elbe River valley another, or Vistula Warsaw another. This time it was the Ardennes area along the Belgium German border regions….closeups show towns built right to the edge of rivers in narrow valleys
Or 1910, when 50 railway workers in a canteen were killed in Schuld at the same time as flood waters destroyed its high street and bridge. B&W photos of that one…
1342? Like just at the end of the Medieval warm period? Oh boy.
That is because people witnessing something for the first time believe it never happened before and they are too lazy or too indoctrinated to check and see if it has.
In the UK weave had (far less serious) flooding over recent years due to EU directives meaning it is no longer possible to dredge rivers and streams causing the flow to be slowed. Did this have any additional bearing on this disaster?
Odd how all these flooding events seem to be the fault of bad town planning, lack of dredging, failure to heed model forecasts (!), etc… It’s as if they have nothing whatsoever to do with the record rainfall events that precede them.
What ‘record’ rainfall events? Planning should take exceptional conditions into account.
Dozens of daily rainfall records were set across the Rhine catchment area.
Is that one of those ‘only records from last 50 years’ are provided now situations. Historical no longer means what it used to mean
I just live some ten meters near Rhine no record to see.
Rhine or Rhineland? As far as I can see, this event occurred in the Rhineland. The Rhine’s source is in the Alps.
Dozens out of what, thousands or tens of thousands of monitored locations? O my!
When the time period of “the record” is last week, every day sets a new high.
A stationary COLD air bubble over Europe in the heart of summer. What could go wrong.
Dozens of stations, out of the thousands in the area.
Ho Hum
TheFinalNail:
Please give a link or reference to the records you mention in order to validate your claim.
A brief description of relevant parts of the data would I’m sure be of interest for readers.
Not holding your breath, I hope.
We know there will be severe weather events. Where I live, there is a rather large bureaucracy devoted to preserving the natural flood plains and preventing development thereon.
If history tells you your area is prone to flooding, and you do nothing to prepare for it, and people die, you are guilty of murder or at very least of criminal negligence.
If rainfall patterns are changing, with extreme precipitation events becoming more regular, then the areas prone to flooding are going to change and increase. Failure to accept and plan for that is also criminally negligent
”…extreme precipitation events becoming more regular…”
Except… ”The 30 most deadly floods in the last 1000 years all occurred before 1980”… The Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany’s meteorological agency revealed that it was a one in a hundred year flood. So not extraordinary for that area.
Look for Vb low pressure systems in Europe.
Nothing unusual.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JD029420
Tell me when the centres of Paris and London were last properly flooded will you?
It wasn’t after 1980 despite the Thames flood barrier!
(In fact the flood barrier was made to avoid repetitions of the events of the 1950s)
Yes, TFN, to the extent that there is any actual validity to your claims that there is a departure from long-term rainfall conditions, there should be actions taken. But with the 30 worst floods all occurring more than 40 years ago, and the greatest Hochwasser coming 679 years ago in 1342, the evidence does not seem to support your contention.
In fact, the deaths of these unfortunate victims should demand action regardless of whether the weather is truly changing.
Start by inquiring into how Belgium and the Netherlands were aware and took action but Germany did not. Timely emergency response alone should have spared lives. Was this government incompetence and bureaucratic negligence, or was it not?
Then move on to adaptation. Dredging to allow faster flow and greater capacity, levees to protect low-lying areas that have foolishly been built in a flood plain or even in a dry arm of a river. Maybe some of those mistakes can only be corrected cost-effectively by removing the ill-advised buildings.
Are these prudent and potentially necessary actions what you had in mind? Or did you propose to try in vain to change the weather by shutting down the economy?
The worst floods in American history were all decades if not centuries ago … from the Great Johnstown Flood to the 1900 hurricane-induced Galveston flood to the hurricane induced floods in Lake Okeechobee and Florida Keys in the 1920s and 1930s.
I expect the same is true all over the world.
100 people dying in Germany is nothing – that wouldn’t even equal a quarter of an hour’s effort during the Holocaust by German Nazis.
This was in the west. The current administration in Germany has its roots in the east. Perhaps they don’t care?
Could you tell me which parts of the German administration in charge for the areas affected have their roots in the Eastern part of Germany?
Here we call people like you Dampfplauderer
Pretty obvious that KC referred to Angela Merkel isn’t it? She is still Bundeskanzlerin.
And as Bundeskanzlerin she is not in charge for the state level warnings / emergengency planing / recovery. This is functionally located on state level (RLP and NRW). Merkel is in charge for the “Bundeswasserstraßen” not for the local rivers and creeks.
Federal govermnent comes in as soon as we talk about federal relief programs.
“Federal govermnent comes in as soon as we talk about federal relief programs.”
MFK, kindly explain that to your compatriots in the US who still are blaming Bush and FEMA for the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.
Does Germany not have a national forecasting group that would be under Merkel’s control and would report to her? Just wondering. Ours certainly issues warnings, esp;. if the weather is predicted to be dire and result in catastrophes as this one with a full damn obviously would. Who is in charge of the damn, by the way? As dams effect regions up and downstream of them, is there no Federal involvement in them?
I’m not arguing that at all. Just saying that it was obvious what KC had in mind. Happy to let you spring your little AHA! and bash down the strawman.
If you want to think about a real question, do you suppose it’s a coincidence that the deep state did their worst in NRW and is it further a complete miracle that the CDU Bundeskanzler candidate runs NRW? Who had the assignment to stalk Laschet until he smiled?
It seems to me that even if TFN’s statements are valid, there was still a massive failure on the part of the German officials to act on what they were warned was going to happen.
There is no evidence that rainfall patterns are changing or that extreme precipitation events are becoming more regular.
There is evidence that prevention methods that work have been abandoned because the greens have demanded it.
Mark W, excellent observations and very true!
Dude! Development occurs where humans want it to occur. That’s why riverine flood plains were always the downtown business districts and industrial center of most cities going back thousands of miles. And of course, those remain the most densely developed areas on the planet, and of course, those are the areas most prone to flooding.
Here in the United States, and I would imagine it is the same in virtually all developed and semi-developed nations, waterfront property is the most hotly desired and the most highly priced real estate available.
Here in Florida, and ocean front single family home lot will cost millions if not tens of millions, while 200 feet inland the value of the lots is less than 1/10 the value of the adjacent waterfront lots. Same of river front lots and even canal front lots or even just lots located on the shore of a rather ugly looking retention pond.
People want to live on the waterfront, and are willing to pay vastly inflate prices in order to live on the waterfront.
And if the rainfall patterns are not changing, and extreme participation events are not more regular [sic], then the areas prone to flooding will not increase.
And if the rainfall patterns have changed resulting in fewer extreme participation events then people will build on the flood plain unless prevented from doing so. People like to build next to the water, even when there is a good chance that they are building in the water.
In Cambodia vast areas are routinely flooded, sometimes annually. All the houses built on “the flood plain” have concrete or wooden pilings and the people live exclusively on the “second floor”.
The downstairs area is used for keeping the rowboat, goats and tools.
The idea that people cannot live on a floodplain is based on the silly notion that you have to live on the ground floor. People live on and over water year round in thousands of communities.
Houses built on concrete pylons are common in Barbados as well. Whatsupwith Europe? Their architects should get out more. Even in prehistoric Mesoamerica they knew how to build in flood plains.
“If rainfall patterns are changing, with extreme precipitation events becoming more regular,”
Except there is no evidence that extreme precipitation events are becoming more regular.
100 years ago, if a “extreme weather event” occurred out where nobody lived, it wasn’t covered on the news.
So what is the plan?
Build more wind turbines and solar panels?
Yeah, that should help.
Imagine if the money wasted on failed solutions to a non-problem had instead been used to prepare for things that are real and have actual solutions.
No amount of wasted money will change the weather.
Nicholas, you’ve hit on one of the many great tragedies of the War on CO2. The vast sums of money being spent on a non-problem is beyond criminal, especially, when necessities are ignored because it’s too expensive to take care of existing infrastructure, or not “green” enough to do what needs to be done, such as not dredging rivers, or making drudging too expensive to be done, as the EU did to the UK.
Exactly, I have trouble getting permitted on a floodplain for non-inhabited structures – we look at the flood history for a reason.
Clearly, you didn’t bother to read the article or maybe it was a lack of comprehension
The article doesn’t mention the “record” rainfall.
For a reason
Can’t find a link there
Try this:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/17/criminal-negligence-authorities-failed-to-heed-flood-warningslet-people-drownmonumental-system-failure/#comment-3294149
The link is to Leo Smith’s comment above (he refers to the 1342 European floods)
Thx
You got the message then
The article doesn’t coincide with your religious beliefs, there for the article is wrong.
Mark W, I wish I could give you 1000 up votes for that!
Funny how alarmists love to ignore the true cause of flooding events so that they can support their religious beliefs that CO2 rules all.
A stationary COLD air bubble over Europe in the heart of summer. What could go wrong.
You must be mistaken, Robertvd. The Earth is WARMING and there are no more cold air bubbles anywhere. Just ask the CAGWers.
“Odd how all these flooding events seem to be the fault of bad town planning, lack of dredging, failure to heed model forecasts”
Not odd at all. Where there has been good planning, proper drainage maintenance, and attention to forecasts, there have been no catastrophic flooding events.
Yes. And the same applies to an opposite condition: fires. Yes, EU regulations “protecting” arguably and never demonstrated “endangered species” of plants and animals along water lines: these regulations in practice prevent the owners of the land to clean them (fines are very high and they do not risk: better to let the bush grow). In the south of my country (Portugal), which is rather flat, when a fire starts, it quickly expands along the water lines. Many of the recent (a few years) forest fires could be avoided if these regulations were not enforced.
Let’s face it. Blaming everything on climate change (or aliens) is much cheaper than having to actually make a decision and do something real. Governments LOVE ”climate change”! They won’t let go easily.
See also, Somerset levels. Failure to dredge as has been done for 1000 years.
It’s very simple. If they want to maintain that dredging was a crime against nature or whatever their choice of overblown rhetoric, then they must ask why was the crime committed.
When it is understood that it was done to mitigate the risks of flooding, then it must, by pure logic, be acknowledged that the cost of the anti-dredging regulation is increased flooding.
If the river must be untouched by tainted human hands, then it means that some portion of the structures built up in the past centuries will need to be abandoned and torn down, or understood to be subject to periodic flood damage.
It’s not evidence that modern civilization needs to be shut down.
“It’s not evidence that modern civilization needs to be shut down.”
If you are a member of the Church of Global Warming, it is evidence that modern civilization be shut down. In fact, it’s one of the tenents of their religion.
They even get to tax us for it!
Nothing cheap about the money wasted on climate change.
The problem is it is all wasted.
If that money was instead spent on storm water management planning and infrastructure, that would make an actual difference.
I wonder how many people stop to think about how land came to be shaped into valleys to begin with, or why flood plains are nice and flat and extend across a wide area near mature rivers?
It does not appear that Germany has strong water/flood law.
Their system seems to be based on insurance risk – “if we get flooded, we’ll sought that out later”
https://www.genevaassociation.org/sites/default/files/flood-risk-management-germany.pdf
This is totally different to what I deal with in Victoria, Australia
yup any earthworks OVER 10cm(or less?) has to be approved FFS!!
only outs are if its raising a roadway on your land OR raised garden beds
I seem to have a lot of odd raised beds at my place;-)))
council raised a low dirt rd that flooded due to their total lack!! of any drainage so now the rds dry but my adjoining land gets flooded hugely as not only the rd side BUT various newbies ran their stormwater to the rear of homes NOT to the front where the land would take water to our nearly drying up again lake
no solution to stupid!! or a vaccine
“no solution to stupid!!”
Despite Mankind’s many advances, we still can’t fix stupid.
“You can educate ignorance, you can medicate crazy, but you cannot fix stupid.”
Here in Australia there are totally different expectations between urban flood management and rural flood management.
Any drowning in a flooded rural river would unlikely be the fault of authorities, a drowning in an urban setting would be fully investigated by the coroner.
There is a common theme here. Bureaucrats warned about xyz, bureaucrats do nothing, predicted disaster follows.
as a german I am seriously asking myself whether the left green dominated bureaucracy decisively did nothing to warn citizens in order to further the climate agenda; may be the order even came from Merkel, a green communist in disguise.
All over people wonder if the bureaucracy is evil or just incompetent. It hardly matters in effect as they have failed in their duty. In either case, they need to be held accountable and this seems not to be happening.
It gets rather difficult to continue to ascribe such problems to incompetence when the same issues are seen over and over. At what point does not correcting repeated incompetence rise to the level of malice?
We seem to have designed a perfect system for no accountability. Until bureaucrats and politicians are held accountable, nothing will change. This is true worldwide.
Sorry Kenen, but what disguise? I have seen her for the East German raised communist that she is for many years. And I live in the USA.
More recently, just watching her reactions to TRUMP! should have been very enlightening to those who had not been paying attention.
According to the MSM, Frau Merkel is “shocked” at the devastation. Shocked! But, by deliberately misattibuting cause, it is clear the MSM and Merkel care only about power, and their friends care only about money.
Kenan, I posted a comment about a half an hour ago wondering about the same thing.
Reminds me of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans did not get but a remote piece of the storm, with only Cat 1 winds. Whereas to the east in Missisippi, where Cat 5 winds came ashore, their loss of life was practically nothing, yet NO suffered over 6 thousand killed and the entire city was wiped out.
So why the difference? In corrupt New Orleans, the levie boards allowed shoddy design and construction on their levies, and when the water levels came up, the levies failed. Also the NO and Louisiana political leaders refused to evacuate as Katrina approached, despite begging from President Bush that they evacuate. In MS, AL, and FL the non-corrupt governments did fine, evacuated as needed, and didn’t suffer failed levies
Yet whom did the media blame for Katrina – the Democrat governor and mayor of New Orleans who clearly screwed the pooch? Nope – they blamed Bush 43.
FEMAs web page states that 3 days is the standard for them to arrive at any disaster. After Katrina, they were on scene after two days.
In the rest of the country state and local officials are expected to be the ones who step in immediately to help. After Katrina, state and local officials were part of the problem, not the solution.
Yeah, in Mississippi practically nothing, if 238 dead and another 135 missing is nothing.
Also 14 in Florida, and about a dozen more from Georgia to Ohio.
Do you ever check anything before you write, Daune?
Not like it is hard to find information, what with this being the frickin’ internet ferchrissake!
Effects of Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi – Wikipedia
“The Gulf Coast of Mississippi suffered near total devastation[1][11][12] from Hurricane Katrina on August 29, with hurricane winds, 28-foot (9 m) storm surge, and 55-foot (17 m) sea waves[13] pushing casino barges, boats and debris into towns, and leaving 236 people dead, 67 missing, and billions of dollars in damages…”
The physical wind damage was far worse in MS, moron … that was my whole point — the relatively light winds in LA should have resulted in very few to zero fatalities there … yet the criminal negligence of the corrupt Democrats resulted in the second most fatalities of any weather event in US history, you numbskull jackwagon!
SMH!!!
You are just a complete jackass who routinely just makes stuff up.
“…their loss of life was practically nothing…”
That is what you said.
238 dead IS practically nothing compared to 6,000 dead in Louisiana.
Do you ever check anything before you write, Nick? Do you do arithmetic … you know, where 6,000 is 40* times 238?
SMH
You just made up that number as well.
The total death count in New Orleans is uncertain, but it is a fraction of the number you made up out of thin air.
Anyone who reads your comments can notice something very distinct…you never give any sources.
Confirmed death counts range from under 1000 for all of Louisiana:
Hurricane Katrina deaths, Louisiana, 2005 – PubMed (nih.gov)
…to as many as 1800-1900 total for the entire world, of which about 1500 were in the US.
The highest number given by any official source for all of Louisiana is 1577, and most researchers dispute that number as having no support, basically a wild ass guess.
NO ONE thinks anything close to 6000 died.
The actual number for the whole world is under one third of that.
2005.pdf (noaa.gov)
Or less:
“The catastrophic damage and loss of life inflicted by this hurricane is staggering, with an estimated 1,353 direct fatalities”
Wayback Machine (archive.org)
Why the hell do you just keep making crap up out of thin air?
Do you ever get tired of making an absolute fool of yourself?
Nearly every comment you make that is not your own opinion is just made up out of nowhere.
Why don’t you just stick to saying things that are true?
Or say so when you are just making guesses off the top of your head?
Prove me wrong…cite a source for what you claim.
In case anyone is wondering why I go out of my way to correct this guys lies, it is because he is not only insufferable, he is arrogant about his refusal to stick to the truth.
Plus, I hate liars.
And Daune is a liar.
Well maybe they did – but this is just pointing at squirrels.
THE ISSUE HERE IS A SEVERE AND EXCEPTIONAL WEATHER EVENT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE.
Isn’t it?
No. Changes in the global temp will not affect local climates.
The Earth’s atmosphere is cooling and shrinking… it’s an open system that shrinks as it cools.
Gravity automatically regulates the amount of energy per metric volume of air, this is why we put thermometers at airports: the energy over the runway stays the same but has less air in the volume therefore less mass to deflect for lift. It is the contained energy that is normalized by gravity and will not change, so the “temperature” of any given amount of air has nothing to do with climate, nor will the “temperature” of all amount of air – because neither affects the wind.
Maybe the physics that birds understand is way too hard for you.
See, the shrinking and cooling causes everything to be more dense and thus the water cycle more well defined within climates. The change in rainfall isn’t a change in climate either, the thermal system and climate are not connected on that small of scale nor are they connected on a global scale.
Actually, the issue isn’t the weather, it’s how they dealt with the weather.
Your argument is from a position of incredulity, which is a logical fallacy. Just because something is exceptional doesn’t mean it is the result of exceptional circumstances. Ordinary circumstances can also produce exceptional events.
No
If you disagree, present your evidence or I’ll assume agreement
“Isn’t it?”
What are you asking? The climate this summer in Western Germany is different this year than most summers. Is that climate change? If it’s dry next summer, is that climate change?
If you are suggesting that the heavy rain was due to global CO2 being higher than 350 ppm, why did the same area flood worse 30 times before 1980? Clearly due to something else.
Maybe you are trying to say that it rained more because the globe is 1 degree warmer than before the IR? As in the warmer air holds more water. And you have point, sort of. Air saturated at 31°C cooling by 10°C will dump about 7% more rain than if initially 30°C. But that will equate to a couple of percent higher flood waters (depends on circumstances but valleys are roughly v shaped and drain quicker with height). Also, where is the modelling that shows climate change from higher CO2 levels will lead to such weather patterns happening more often? Your simple argument only explains a few inches deeper flood waters.
If you are going to do some hand waving, I’ll add mine own. The globe is supposed to have warmed 1 degree but minimums at higher latitudes and altitudes more than maxima of tropical waters. So you would expect the same weather pattern to be 30.5°C saturated warm air cooling by 9°C instead of 30°C cooling by 10°C. Just pointing out that its not a rock solid argument to say warmer air holds more water.
Exactly Van der Leyen’s statement, and she knows where the money is – CO2 taxes at a border near you.
The Green Credit spiggot will be opened (hooves lining up at the trough), and that tsunami will carry the entire physical economy to the sea.
Ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Not van, von der Leyen
(Pronounced fond of lyin’)
A layperson, literally an amateur.
Von der LAMER!!
Lamer because of being rewarded continously for failure….
1/ German army restructuring.
2/ Vaccine blow job.
3/ Carbon tax which will be rejected by Vishegrad countries once they get “wind” it will make the average joe blogs in the street have to pay 100% more for electricity.
Very lucky if only 100% more, I’d guess.
Still I prefer fond ‘a lyin’ because the phonetics work so nicely.
Isn’t exceptional at all, every 15 -20 years much the same severe weather event will occur somewhere between Paris and Warsaw…. It just various in the centre of flooding because weather is like that.
Where I live we having less rainfall, much less inspire of claims of warmer temperatures means atmosphere can hold more moisture.
Only to you Griff.
No
Temper, temper… you forgot your meds again eh?
griff, you deserve a prize for exhausting my Christian charity…
There is more life beyond climate change, man!
There is more world beyond local floods or hot days, man! — there IS cold days, very cold days as well!
There is more chemistry than CO2, man! — just take some lessons.
There is much more physics in climate “than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, man!
Learn something!… Take lessons!… Read some books!… Of course, these are only palliative measures that result on people with some brains and intelligence… if you got none of the two, it is useless to try to find them in supermaket shelves…
anyone remember this from 6 weeks ago?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/06/06/while-experts-like-to-have-us-believe-germany-is-still-in-drought-real-observations-tell-us-another-story/
Your response, griff?
griff?
griff?
🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗
I think griff’s response function is broken.
No.
Have to show how much the temperature has risen over the particular area which flooded, and then show how that rise in temperature led to the combination of heavy rain and blocking highs.
If you start doing this, you realize immediately that there is a problem. What about the temperature difference between spring and summer, for instance? Far greater than recent warming, and not leading to regular catastrophes.
There has been a very small rise in temperatures, on a par with the peaks of previous warmings in the 20c and earlier. Nothing that could cause anything very exceptional, and absolutely no way to connect the floods in that particular area to temperature rises.
And anyway, the bad faith aspect of the argument is shown very clearly in the German Green demands to use this to justify reducing their emissions. Reducing their emissions will have no effect on global emissions or global temps, let alone local ones. It will do absolutely nothing to prevent more flooding, even if we accept the idiotic claim that the flooding does have something to do with warming.
No single event can be attributed to climate change and pretending it can be is not scientific. We do not understand the systems well enough to pretend we’re God and can know how CO2 forcing would have created this one event
“No single event can be attributed to climate change and pretending it can be is not scientific.”
Griff, and his alarmists friends, need to repeat that sentence over and over again in their heads until they understand it.
When was weather ever predictable enough to define an exceptional event?
Very predictable when you have an enormous anticyclone stationary over western Russia extending all the way over the Baltic states into Scandinavia giving exceptionally high temperatures…
while several massive low pressure systems come pouring from the Atlantic laden with loads of water saturated clouds.
As the june heatwave in France & Germany gave way to lower pressures, and lots of weather fronts coming directly over France to crash into the alps, then produce weeks of severe thunderstorms as the 2 different temperature gradients clash….
Well who would have thought it??
In the space between the 2 you get torrential downpours, all clearly forecast with the unstable weather that followed on from the boiling June.
All this was pretty clearly forecast as long ago as the 3rd-4th week of JUNE.
Weather forecasting is not black magic, it’s fairly obvious stuff, which is why I plan my entire summer’s work around the weather (cos a lot of it takes place outside!)
Right now the hottest place to be with the most sunshine has been in a broad space from Moscow-St Petersburg and all the way across thru Tallinn-Helsinki-Riga to Stockholm.
The Baltic sea is as a result quite a bit warmer than the mediteranean!
Excellent summary. Pay attention, Griff.
“griff
July 18, 2021 12:18 am
THE ISSUE HERE IS A SEVERE AND EXCEPTIONAL WEATHER EVENT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE.”
From the article;
“Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, blamed the extreme weather on global warming during a visit to a hard-hit area.
“We will be faced with such events over and over, and that means we need to speed up climate protection measures… because climate change isn’t confined to one state,” he said.
Experts say that climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, but linking any single event to global warming is complicated.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57846200
Who to believe a premier or an expert? My takeaway from the use of the word “complicated” is that even the experts don’t know, let alone a premier.
That is a very strong statement that requires evidence to support it. When you present such evidence, we can all evaluate it. Or you could just say the weather event was caused by seagulls flapping their wings in the Arctic.
I thought it was due to a butterfly flapping its wings in South America./sarc
Hope you get the reference to chaos theory ramblings.
I thought about that reference, but seagulls in the Arctic sounded more plausible. Or not.
Seagulls in the Arctic would also resonate more clearly to Griff!
Sure it was an extreme weather event. But so far there has been no statistical analysis to quantify HOW extreme it was.
It seems to me, it was an accident waiting to happen. Caused by stupid land management (e.g. removal of hedgerows), stupid catchment management, and stupid waterways management (creation of “autobahns for water”), compounded by inappropriate development on floodplains. (If you are going to build, on a floodplain, at least build your house up on piers!!)
The result is a significant decease in the catchments’ “concentration time” ( or ability to attenuate the runoff).
No griff (yawn). Even if you capitalize ALL THE LETTERS!! The issue here is a severe and exceptional weather event. Full stop.
In which time period would you prefer to live your life?
[__] Benign low CO2 1675-1750
[__] Dangerous CO2 1950-2025
[__] Really nice CO2 1325-1345
Option 3 extended until your meds kick in and you stop obsessing on the this flood that was far less serious than the one in 1342.
It was severe, but it wasn’t exceptional, and there isn’t a shred of evidence that it was caused by climate change.
Shouting doesn’t change reality.
A stationary COLD air bubble over Europe in the heart of summer. What could go wrong.
There’s my boy! $27!
Many people (apparently including Griff) do not understand the meaning of a “100 year event”.
It does not mean that a similar occurrence appears only once in a hundred years somewhere on earth.
Rather, it is expected only once in in 100 years in that very specific area. But there are many such areas in Germany; in the EU and across the globe.
Therefore it is very likely that a “100 year event” will occur on any given day somewhere on earth. Thus it is not “earth shaking” (smile).
It also does not mean that the 100 year event could not happen two years in a row, or more than once in the same year. It is a statistical average, nothing more.
I tried to make the same point, nowhere nearly as succinctly as you, to Griff on a post a few days ago.
Griff this is a once in century event: it happened also in 1910 and 1804. Were those events aso human caused?
It was caused by WTF!
WTF events happen all the time, which is why we don’t live with dinosaurs or mammoths today.
Have to you heard of a little place called Vaison la romaine?
Here you are for a little addition to your infinite knowledge of past events:-
(I remember it well!)
L’inondation de Vaison-la-Romaine en septembre 1992 est un phenomene de submersion dû à de forts cumuls de pluie et une imperméabilité importante des terrains.
Cette catastrophe s’est produite les lundi 21 et mardi 22 septembre 1992 à Vaison-la-Romaine, dans le département français de Vaucluse en régionProvence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Elle a causé 47 morts et 4 disparus dans quatre communes.
that’s just 30 years ago, cause by a WTF event when several super cells converged on one area – something caused not by climate change but ordinary CONVECTION.
The fact that people had put a caravan site in the bed of a river and built houses in areas known for flooding was clear..
Exactly as regularly happens in the valley of the VAR and the hinterland which was violently flooded thanks to a stationary low pressure system over the area of le ROYA – Breil-sur-Roya the 2nd october last year.
LESSON, DO NOT BUILD houses in area which are off limits because of a once in a 50 year violent storm and flood, like you don’t build houses on the sloped of Volcanoes like Vesuvius.
Go figure! People still do it, and don’t mind the “Russian Roulette” that goes with it.
“Isn’t it?”
Glad you asked.
The answer is no.
So we’re clear here, griff: you are claiming that the German officials DID heed the warnings they were given? Or that they are not responsible for ignoring the warnings simply because this was “exceptional”? Because even if what you say is true, that doesn’t change the fact that the warnings were ignored. Can you address that?
griff,
Congratulations! You outdid yourself and set a record for “green” stupidity!
You do know there has been no exceptional, nor more frequent Extreme Weather events, right? No?
Aerial photography by the US in WW2 is lynchpin proof that the flooding in Germany is due to it’s more recent government. Pre WW2 the drainage was superior. to what it is now.
More people in rural areas working the land have a greater connection to the countryside than modern urban dwellers. They knew the importance of good land management including drainage because they would be affected by it.
Pre-Maastricht is more apt.
To say there was no warning flies in the face of these repeated weather channels in French and in German for everyone to view (until they censor)?
https://www.youtube.com/c/KaiZornWetter
looks hard at at least 4 weather models, and just look at the last 10 days shows.
And :
https://www.youtube.com/c/wetterkachelmann/videos
made repeated warnings.
Just look at the east border of France over the last 10 days :
https://www.youtube.com/c/cieldefrance
Where does Ursula van der Leyen think the French weather goes – falls of the edge of the earth right at the border not far from Brussels?
Seems clear this disaster is required to push van der Leyen’s ‘Fit for 55’ EU Green New Deal, which Hungary rejected. Note Switzerland, rejected this stuff a couple of weeks ago, and they know flooding and landslides!
Merkel promised reconstruction, van der Leyen did not.
Have we a replay of the infamous 1971 open debate in NY, now with ¨If Germany had accepted the Green New Deal, catastrophes would not have been necessary¨?
Or have we the even more scurrilous – ¨If Russia and China accept the Rules Based Order, NATO action would not be necessary¨ – note NATO and the Pentagon place climate and China on their top list of adversaries.
From a story at DW
German flood prevention still can’t prevent floods
“Take the Elbe River at Wittenberge, says Winfried Lücking, flood expert at Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND). “East of the river, in Brandenburg state, the dykes are 80 centimeters higher than west of the river, in Saxony-Anhalt – you can imagine where the water goes,” he said.”
That is extraordinary incompetence from Albania let alone Germany. What’s going on?
Not quite. The Bundeswehr had a plan for 30 years to build up Elbe dykes, and it was blocked by the Black Zero, that Finance Ministry policy. Zero infrastructure spending, ironically accompanied recently by massive green subsidies.
Note however that in 2002, the disaster of the massive Elbe flood, ¨a crucial railway bridge at Eilenburg, in the eastern German state of Saxony whose infrastructure has been devastated by the big August 2002 floods, was partially rebuilt within only 36 hours! The restored section of that bridge again allows one-line transfer between the cities of Leipzig and Dresden. The Eilenburg project worked because the German government had decreed that flood-devastated regions could be rebuilt in record time, bypassing the usual bureaucratic and extreme ecologist procedures. After removing the destroyed old railway bridge, engineers from all parts of Germany formed a crash project team that restored half of the bridge with prefabricated components “overnight.” The example shows what is possible when aspects of military engineering are applied in the civilian economy.¨
See :
https://larouchepub.com/other/2003/3001shanghai_maglev.html
The Army Corps approach worked before in the USA, now in China, and can work again in Germany.
Chancellor Schroeder at the time said the EU Maastricht Treaty forbade sufficient funds. That is the EU commission’s stance it seems now.
Ironically this flood and the 2002 disaster occurs right in the middle of an election!
Is nature reminding us of our responsibility? Some, like unelected EU Commission figures, may feel immune, while EU subjects take the full voter backlash.
https://michaelsmithnews.typepad.com/.a/6a0177444b0c2e970d026bdee102bc200c-pi
A town in eastern Germany, but it highlights how often there is a big flood somewhere in Europe even when CO2 was lower than 350 ppm.
I confirm, following Kachelmanns twiter channel and the rain radar, that there were warning fo heavy rsinfall up to more than 120mm for the different regions.
If only the responibles did have s look on…
I posted 3 links above to daily weather channels, still available on youtube. My only worry is that those watching at Ahrweil might not have looked out the window. There was pllenty of warning. There should have been an evacuation order, those village sirens go off for less reason.
Unfortunately these channels are not part of the official TV, so you have to look at Kachelmanns Twitter channel, where these videos are actually linked.
The responsibles may not have a look on.
The weather forecasts in TV often miss these infos.
If I remember well, the DWD warned too.
I am sure DWD uses the same 4 weather models, computed hourly, that Kai Zorn uses. Anyway now the question is reconstruction and Maastricht.
Google “European floods 1910”. Paris was underwater in June that year. Not one single person died either as they had the police and army out quickly.
Some European governments have increased their populations on purpose which has required ever more building even in very densely populated areas. The pressure for housing has meant flood plains are getting built upon with the easily foreseen consequences.
Floods have always happened, but they are made worse by short memories and poor planning.
Google Elbe 2002, and see what happened.
It would be interesting to hear, from a lawyer, what the German (or EU) considers criminal negligence on the part of government or media. I’m sure that the phrase there means something other than it does in the U.S., but also pretty there will there be no charges filed, and probably not a law suit, except maybe over this public opinion blame game.
When I lived in Germany in the 80s and 90s, and much earlier toured part of the country before reunification, it was pretty clear that no one, especially in the bureaucracy, was rarely, if ever, considered responsible for any disaster of this sort. And I can attest to witnessing several similar events over many years, so it is nothing new.
What happened to the permanent drought destroying farm crops in Germany? Didn’t we hear about that just a couple months ago?
Snapped this in Passau in 2018. Previous flood levels marked on town hall tower. How about 500 years of warning? Those who do not learn from history…
I have a similar photo from Heidelberg, where I saw the Neckar River flood the lower town about 30 years ago. That flood didn’t come anywhere near the highest floods marked on the Alte Brucke. Heidelberg is different, in that it is along a river nestled in a fairly deep valley. I am sure it was a mess to clean up, but not record or unprecedented. I would bet you could see the same thing in most old towns in Germany.
Could this be the reason? The convoluted jet stream at the grand Solar minimum
No
So, effectively, greentards in media and government allowed the loss of life to propagate the lies about the climate, all those lives were willing sacrificed for the Cause. Sick, anti-human scumbags.
Lies, lies and more lies.
Glad you are finally seeing the light, CNN-Simon.
You don’t have to tell us, everyone knows you are a liar.
But they broadcast shit and let people drown.” – article
Either the :”authorities” don’t care or they just don’t give a flying frack in space about anything other than their own comfort.
And doing stupid things? Putting subdivisions in flood-prone areas? It doesn’t just happen in other countries. A few years back, a subdivision that was built within barking distance of a northern branch of a local mainstream river flooded, and the entire subdivision had to be evacuated. It wasn’t just a few inches of water: it was two feet of water standing in the streets, with fish swimming around in it. All of that went into the basements of those overpriced homes and the entire subdivision was permanently dismantled. It still happens when rains are heavy, or snow melt is a larger volume than expected, and the greed of developers does nothing but damage other people, never mind the landscape.
Still happens, too, when the smaller tributaries get a heavy load, dump it into the local rivers which start to overflow, and before long there is another flood.
This year, the subdivision dwellers got lucky because we had several weeks with little to no spring rain. Next year, they may not be quite so lucky.
Glad I live on the top of an ancient sand dune.
The stupid is strong over there in Germany.
A large part of the flood damage in Houston from Hurricane Harvey was subdivisions built inside of an engineered flood control basin at elevations lower than the emergency spillway.
I lived i Chicago for 30 years, before I moved out to the north ‘burbs. Every apartment I lived in (3 big brick 1920s buildings) was built on the top of ancient dunes that mark the real shores of Lake Michigan. The slope dcwn to the lake shore is now about 1.5 miles long., all built up with single-family homes and multi-unit apartments.
I’m waiting for the day when Lake Michi Gamu starts to rise, as it did a couple of years ago, and doesn’t retreat but keeps rising. I don’t know what volume of water it would take to get that rise, but taking dry earth for granted is a very bad idea.
Some insights:
Quickly find a guilty party, an explanation, and a solution
By Sebastian Lüning
Persistent heavy rain caused severe flooding in western Germany in mid-July 2021. There were many dead and missing, houses collapsed, people had to be rescued from the roofs by helicopter. The electricity and water supply failed partially. A disaster. My condolences go out to all concerned. The focus should now be on supporting the injured party: a compartment above the head, food, medical care, repairing the damage and filling out insurance forms. It is all the more strange when individual actors now instrumentalize the tragedy for their own purposes.
For German readers (or else try google translate)
Die Ahr und ihre Hochwässer in alten Quellen
Dr. Karl August Seel
https://www.kreis-ahrweiler.de/kvar/VT/hjb1983/hjb1983.25.htm
https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TVert&from=&to=en&a=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kreis-ahrweiler.de%2Fkvar%2FVT%2Fhjb1983%2Fhjb1983.25.htm
Thank you. There’s a lot of history there that must be revised and forgotten by climate “scientists.”
I think this is an important point. Inept politicians and policy makers can always blame the “climate change” boogeyman to avoid any personal responsibility.
Of course, flood have happened before and will happen again:
Central Germany’s Devastating Freak Flood of 1965…Back When CO2 Was Only 320 ppm.
griff, did you read this?
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Of course griff didn’t read it.
He only drops his propaganda turds and runs away.
And, he has never apologized for saying that Susan Crockford wasn’t a scientist. I don’t know how people like that sleep at night.
Maintenance shutdown, most likely, Clyde.
Don’t tell Griff but even the Guardian has noticed that paving over everywhere has ramifications for flooding.
‘We’ve done it to ourselves’ – floods that hit London came as no surprise ‘ Amelia Hill July 14th 2021
Classic European attitude from German citizens…the government must take care of us. Did every one of them ignore the forecast?
The inept authorities blamed the German people for the flood by mentioning CO2 as a cause. Cave to their plans to save the world and you won’t drown. Pathetic.
Nearly 2000 years since Jesus told the the parable of a wise and foolish builder but despite our explosion of knowledge people continue building on dangerous foundations and in dangerous areas.
Miami-Dade surfside does look a lot like building on sand.
The amount of paving is not what determines flooding. It is the degree to which stormwater management practices take into account the paving of areas within their watersheds.
Here in Florida, you cannot build anything without providing stormwater management facilities such as retention ponds, detention ponds, canals, etc. that are property engineered to reduce peak stormwater runoff flows to manageable rates. The areas of Florida that still flood anyway are the older areas that were developed before stormwater management practices became codified here in the 1970s.
So Florida proves that exactly the same rainwater falling on the same area produces very different flooding results, depending upon whether the local infrastructure is properly engineered or not.
The same would be true in Germany, except that Germany having been urbanized centuries before Florida was urbanized, they likely have much larger proportions of areas that lack proper engineering design than Florida, most of whose urban areas have been developed in the last 40 years.
Here in France it’s the same. Now we mosquitoe breeding ponds everywhere, at the same time they tell to no to leave saucers under plant pots !!!
How are those two sentences not contradictory?
An important parameter in all urban hydrological models, used for calculating the amount and speed of runoff, is the percentage of impervious area in each hydrological basin. Ask any urban hydrologist.
Daune is full of crap.
The idea that recently built-up places in Florida are impervious to flooding is ludicrous.
He just makes this crap up.
As as you properly point out, Clyde, the things he says are not even coherent.
I am starting to wonder if he has a chronic internetting while drunk problem.
There are some real wingnuts that show up here. Most of them, like griff, are definitely of the left-hand thread persuasion, but not all. Then, there are the ones that are thoroughly modern, and thread either way, depending on whether the day of the week ends in a “Y.”
A stationary COLD air bubble over Europe in the heart of summer. What could go wrong.
So the truth is that it was TOO COLD over much of Europe for the time of the year.
“Bubbles” is the new climate. Heat domes, cold bubbles, who invented this crap?
meteorologists – usual therm
Look here,
In 2012, Somerset was flooded. A lot of the locals blamed EU rules I wonder if the same can be said of the German floods?
As I wrote to a prior post, rain is natural, but, floods are caused by the human built environment. Flood deaths, as here, are a failure of government to protect their population.
More alarmist misinformation regards flooding!
Greatest precipitation was during colder periods like the Little Ice Age that drove Europe’s glacier expansions which also caused highest lake levels! from Holzhauser 2005
This was the first thing that jumped out at me when I saw the first photos. The whole down seems to be on the flood plane just 1 or 2m above the river.
I’m not familiar enough with styles of german architecture to tell how old these homes are.
Doubtless searching the “hinterland” upstream will reveal a lot of impermeable surface leading to flooding. The town of Altenau seems to filling up the surrounding fields and thus contributing to flooding downstream.
The flooding may be human caused but it’s the via CO2 emissions.
CO2 isn’t able to produce low pressure systems in Vb category., and no others too 😀
Just heard on Sky News: “Germany is reeling under nature’s fury.”
This is why I rarely listen to Sky News or any of the media organizations in their club.
24 hours for the BBK to get their act together! Why didn’t they? Who in the BBK was responsible and that begs the question, why?
I cannot believe that this was an ‘accidental coalition of events’ that prevented a huge effort to warn and help the residents of the zones already clearly identified. Particularly as the BBK had already had the benefit of a failed effort last September with 11 months to rectify the situation.
And please Herr Geier of the BBK, don’t blame the people, that is no excuse.
Historically check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_Europe
Historically globally check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods
An exceptionally high “reply to griff” to “griff” ratio in these comments: 42:1, at least before I wrote this comment (which brings it to 44:1).
The essence of being stupid is not realizing that one is stupid. griff is oblivious to what people think about what he says. When he does reply, it is usually some off the wall remark that is often a non sequitur.
The damage caused by the German floods only goes to demonstrate that ‘climate change’ is less of a reality, but more of a political “The dog ate my homework” excuse for bad management and bureaucratic inertia when it comes to disaster planning.
No wonder ‘man made climate change\ is so popular among the political classes. It’s a cheap and easy toss-off answer to the complexities of weather and climate, although not cheap to the consumer nor good for the environment.
The Climate Liars just love love love their “extreme weather” meme, because it allows them to confuse, conflate, and confabulate completely separate issues. The floods in Germany were a “perfect storm” of issues, including, of course some very unusual and intense rainfall. However, that has happened before. So what else is going on that the Climate Liars like to pretend isn’t happening. There are several things, but it all boils down to human stupidity regarding the physics of water, and not only not planning for that, but actually making things much, much worse than they would otherwise have been. Building in flood plains. Paving surfaces without accounting for where water is going to go. Constricting waterways, channeling that water and making the flow faster and more deadly. Yes indeed, human stupidity is deadly, as is inertia. It is so much easier to not spend money and do nothing to help mitigate disasters ahead of time, and then, to top it all off, try to lay the blame on CO2.
Yeah, “Carbon” did it. That’s the ticket.
“The climate argument is used by politicians to deflect attention from their own responsibility for a disaster.”
Exactly what I’ve been saying for years. Politicians sit back and do nothing, then when something happens they blame “climate change” and promise to “do something” to “fix” it. Then they spend their time and their constituent’s money with fake fixes that accomplish nothing, and when the next disaster strikes, rinse and repeat.
It’s good to finally see people saying this publicly.
“Monumental system failure”
As there is no possible reason imaginable for this failure to warn and as we live in a time where we have good short term weather forecasting and instantaneous communication abilities via multiple means, I must wonder if it is possible that this was deliberate? Did someone think if there was a flood disaster, it would boost the case for CAGW and all of the Government’s insane and expensive “remedies”?
I know I may sound paranoid and I am more than will to follow the maxim, “Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence.” However, when the damn is full and it is certain a major rainstorm is on the way and the authorities do nothing but make a post to FB, that level of incompetence sounds unfathomable and malice becomes a more reasonable proposition.
I cannot believe in a nation such as Germany, especially, Germany, there are not, just like here, protocols in place that are activated when severe weather, esp., with the certainty of a damn overflow and imminent flooding. That people were not warned and evacuated is inconceivable and inexplicable and defies rationality. That is when one starts looking for other reasons to explain the inexplicable.