Reposted from the NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin on 18. July 2021
Officials left dams full to the brim at least 3 weeks long during a rainy period and then failed to undertake a controlled release even when 150 mm of rain were forecast 4 days before the floods.
Now they want to hide their gross incompetence and blame climate change.
Yesterday I posted how Germany’s flood disaster could have been prevented in large part, especially in terms of lives lost. The latest death toll has risen to over 150.
Although the heavy rains had been forecast days in advance, nothing was done to avert the inevitable destruction. Instead of taking responsibility, politicians are blaming climate change in a bid to shift attention away from their incompetence and gross negligence.
Negligence worse than we thought
But it turns out the gross negligence may have been even worse than we thought: Dams constructed to regulate the flow of mountain streams and rivers had been left full for weeks before the disaster struck – despite Europe being stuck in a rainy period.
For illustration purpose only. Photo by: Hahnenkleer. Copyright: see here.
No controlled release to add dam volume
One independent journalist, Henning Rosenbusch, tweeted at Twitter a clip of a German citizen commenting to a “Welt” reporter:
Anwohner: “Mir ist aufgefallen, dass seit mind. 3 Wochen alle Talsperren voll bis oben hin waren und nicht kontrolliert abgelassen wurden.” pic.twitter.com/U4pc2HA1sg
— henning rosenbusch (@rosenbusch_) July 18, 2021
The resident in a flooded region tells the “Welt” reporter how every week he rides his mountain bike along dams that hold back waters in valleys. “I noticed that for the last 3 weeks all dams were full to the top – up to just 20 – 30 cm from the brim. These dams are there to hold back the water. Why didn’t they release some of the water in a controlled way much earlier? For me it’s unimageable. This whole thing should not have happened if there had been 10 or 20% more available volume in the dams.”
The reporter answered: “That’s criticism I’ve heard again and again today.”
Dereliction of duty?
Three weeks long dams were left full to the top even with long range forecasts (14 days) showing more and more rain on the way. It’s been a rainy summer, and there were no signs things would change soon.
Then 4 days before the catastrophe struck, meteorologists warned that up to 150 mm of rain was on the way. The filled dams were ticking time bombs that needed to be defused – and there was the opportunity to do so. But for whatever reason, nothing was undertaken by the authorities to release water behind the dams in a controlled manner to create capacity and slow the downstream flow.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Seems appropriate:
When the Levee Breaks (Remaster) – YouTube
Regards,
Bob
One of my favorites.
Or in this case, when they drove their Chevy to the levee, it wasn’t dry. Then they got bombed on whiskey and rye.
The person charged with the decision to draw down the stored water will of course be a government flunky.
Therefore, there will be no significant penalty for failing at your ONE JOB, and adding to the death toll.
The only exception, will be if some actual politician finds THEIR head on the chopping block. In that situation, a sacrificial lamb will be found on the “Water Resources” Board (whatever it is called in Germany).
And they will claim that they were “only following orders”
What.. too soon?
The real problem is that the meteorologists didn’t tell them what to do, they merely warned of a particular event. Climate Scientologists do it properly, and tell you how to run your government as well, you see.
It’s summer.
That person is on holiday in Spain.
One would think that they would do the right things, prevent floods, and then rightly claim that they are smart enough to beat CC, and look like heros. Strange!
The ONLY way to beat CC is to force lifestyle restrictions on the common folk.
Any other method is destined to fail – say 98% of “internet” scientists!
/sarc off
That’s what puzzles me too! They’ve got departments chock full of experts, universities and institutes crammed with smart scientists, and they best they can do is acknowledge the damage and blame it on the all powerful and unpredictable climate change.
It is the same method Merkel used for the refugees flood a few years ago. She and her masters really hate Germans.
So the professionals in charge of regulating water flow appear to have not thought through the consequences of this week’s circumstances. Even those with over 40 years of experience appear to have been flummoxed by the almost unimaginable occurrence of lots of rain followed by a forecast of further heavy rain to come and just allowed the water to build up to a dangerous levels.
Seriously?
And now the politicians have a crisis that cost lives to hang their tax rises on.
What a crock!!
Yeah, but they get to blame Mother Nature’s Climate Change (is there a song in there?) so they don’t have to take any responsibility for the disasters that will follow.
By disasters, what if next fall and winter, we in the Northern Hemisphere have a very, very heavy duty winter with more than normal volumes of snow and freezing rain? That isn’t climate change, it’s just weather and weather is very volatile (as you know), so it’s very possible that it might happen everywhere in the north, with heavy snows in the Sahara and the Saudi peninsula. But they’ll sit on their backsides and blame an invisible non-entity called climate change for bad weather, and do nothing to prevent real disasters.
Were these reservoirs even used for hydropower?
In my region, the multi-use component of our flood control reservoirs is recreation.
We DO NOT leave them at full pool at the start of the rainy season!
It is stupid not to take any mitigation actions prior to a confidently predicted massive rain event. It takes a SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID to not have spare capacity in your safety system prior to the time period of the seasonally expected emergencies.
Maybe their most experienced hydrologist used the wrong pronoun and had to retire.
Maybe the most experienced hydrologist was a political appointee.
the insurance companies might have an opinion on that screwup?
Well, for a third time, rain is natural, floods are caused by the human built environment and human action and, more importantly, inaction. But as in all other cases, those in government who made the bad decisions will keep their jobs while yammering on about “climate change” and “resilency”.
Not all flooding is caused by human interference. The Mississippi River floods regularly. It’s the reason for dikes and levees built along the river’s path. but if the water volume coming south is way over the containment capacity of those flood diversions, it just turns into another Big Flood. The 1927 Missisiippi River flood was a bad one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927
At least we have people who get right to work on it.
The dikes make the flooding worse because the water used to spread out, keeping the level down. Now it builds up much higher, overtops the levee, washes it out, and destroys towns. Much better to just explain to people what a flood plain is, why we need it there, and let people build there pay their own flood insurance.
For the first time, the Scab Lands were caused by floods and man had nothing to do with it. If you wish to modify to “some floods” I would agree.
Not so fast with floods are “human built environment”. I have walked a lot through Mesozoic basins and seen the record of a flood cycle killing many dinosaurs..The lesson here is that water officials are no smarter than dinosaurs.
Mr. Gaslioli- this is fabulous. It is a great quip to post EVERYWHERE.
And most dinosaurs’ brains were the size of walnuts.
And since most politicians’ brains have shrunk to something the size of a cough drop. that means that even dinosaurs had more ganglia in their brains than politicians.
For the record, volume or size of brain is less significant than quantity of ganglia in the brain itself. Corvids like ravens have more ganglia in their brains than humans do, and yet, our brain size is much larger than that of those birds.
They actually have a press in Germany? With real journalists? CBC would never report anything like that.
A good point but one that needs some fleshing out. I hadn’t followed events leading up to where the Germans are now, but it appears many in the public noticed the incongruity of the threat posed and the similarly apparent lack of action beforehand. Are those appearances accurate? If so, had the press asked early on what the authorities were to doing to mitigate the threat? Had the press asked why authorities weren’t lowering the reservoirs and demand answers?
Those are just two of many questions. The press had four days. if not more, to prod authorities to substantiate their lack of action. My point is that this is the self-proclaimed raison d’etre of the press — that government is bound to be filled with buffoons if left to it’s own devices and will act like buffoons if not held accountable, not just for the end result but all along the road to calamity.
If the press hadn’t been holding the authorities’ collective feet to the fire leading up to this disaster, then they are just as responsible as the authorities for the end result and publishing the public’s notice, now, as 20/20 foresight is more an effort to shift their part of the blame for buffoonish-ness onto the shoulders of government.
The press was too busy spinning the looming, and then actually happening, desaster into hysteric Climate Change Panic headlines. Anyone doing something else in this situation would have been ousted as extreme-right conspiracy theorist – more than one reputable paper has been thrown under the bus for daring to call out on similar matters, and by now, the remaining ones all sing the Green Litany more-or-less in unison (except a number of small-scale local papers that however are hardly read beyond the town or county where they are printed…)
Here in central North Carolina the planners are always looking at the rainfall potential, especially with tropical storms. The information is constantly on local weather TV broadcasts and proactive action is taken when prudent. Of course we have flooding rains every year. The areas that flood are well known and our counties have rapid response teams outfitted with inflatable boats and practice constantly since flash flooding from intense thunderstorms can occur during the summer. So it can be done and done well.
That said people still drive into rapidly moving water and end up on top of their cars waiting on a helicopter or rescue team to get them to safety. You can’t fix stupid.
They do that here, too. See a load of water on the pavement, get out and look at it, then drive right into it and wonder why they are stranded.
O Griffio, Griffio, wherefore art thou Griffio?
You invoked part of the canon of Western Civilization.
I expect you to denounce yourself and immediately report to the re-education camp!
(I am pretty sure I will be joining you there shortly.)
They probably did not want to “waste” that energy because who know when the winds stops blowing. A lot of the energy in Germany comes from unreliable sorces like wind and solar.
My thoughts exactly. They were so intent on saving the water for use as “green energy” they accepted the risks without really understanding them. So they blame “climate change” when it’s really “green energy voodoo”.
By all means blame the autorities. But don’t people know where they live?
No, people have no idea that they live in floodplains. Events that have not happened in living memory are deemed “unprecedented”.
I probably misunderstood your joke. But anyway the negligence of decision makers is twofold: permitting ongoing development in known floodplains & failure to adequately warn residents of pending floods. In general there is a falsehood in believing dams will somehow prevent flooding in narrow river valleys. History teaches us time and time again that dams will not protect against this type of event no matter what people want to believe – all dams can do in river valleys is to even out the flow a bit. When the whole system floods the dams are practically useless. Emptying the tiny reservoirs would have made no difference – people will try to blame the dam operators but this would be a false argument in this situation. I do recognise the optics is bad if the tiny reservoirs were not emptied, and so the dams might offer a convenient scapegoat if it comes to that. I see it’s already happening and if ministers are taking too much heat they might try to encourage a deflection of blame to the local operators. It happens every time, and it’s an effective argument because people do not understand riverine dams. Nor, it seems, do people understand that floodplains flood.
I’ve got the little FEMA odds table right here on my desk. It says that over a 30 year mortgage life span a home in the 100-year floodplain has a 39% chance of having the 100 year event hit.
My question is, if you have a 80 year old home in the mapped floodway/floodplain that has never been impacted by floodwaters, what are the odds are that the maps are incorrect?
My next question is, if you are given a 1000 homes in twenty differing basins that have not experienced a financial flooding impact over the life of the formally defined floodplains (about 50 years), what are the odds that the mapped regulatory floodplains are complete crap?
My last question is: why do some people want to directly impact others in a harmful manner, just to avoid a potential future indirect/tangential impact to themselves?
I don’t totally understand the premise of the questions. There isn’t much uncertainty where natural floodplains are. Surficial geology/topography tells the story. If you have fluvial deposits in a flat valley bottom with a meandering river in the middle it’s a riverine floodplain. Crunching numbers like that is for insurance agents. Nature doesn’t care about statistical frequency constructs we’ve devised for rainfall. The risk tolerance is up to local planning committees but this decision making isn’t usually communicated to landowners. Once a development is approved nobody will think of the risk again. We should only hope town have the wherewithal to warn residents when their statistical bet has failed and a catastrophic flood is imminent.
Yes thats right. ordinary people have little to no understanding of flooding and flood levels even when living next to stream/river.
Even in well drained urban areas the pipelines are built for a say 1 in 15 or 20 yr recurrence. Anything more than that and it will fill the road/backyard/basement or a little brook will become a raging torrent for a few hours
You can build in flood plains if you elevate the house on columns as they do in many other places in the world. It is not complicated. If you are going to have floods, building accordingly. That’s all.
might work in marshes, coastal areas, and lower reaches/river deltas. narrow valleys running downhill with concentrated flow will erode the foundations of your stilts. But it’s just my opinion.
JCM, you may be right, yet you have failed to quantify your assertion.
So put some numbers on the “tiny reservoirs” and the volume of runoff.
Because it appears obvious that if multiple reservoirs in a catch basin were inches from full, and a heavy rain on all ready saturated ground predicted, floods would very likely result.
So without seeing real numbers I see no reason to accept your assertion.
Also consider that the higher and longer a dam overflows, the more likely you are to have dam failures, and the more likely you are to have less time and warning before floods result.
These are small U shaped valleys of glacial origin. They are nothing like the great rivers of the southern USA or Australia with great plains for endless flood storage behind dams that some might be envisioning. The hydraulics is straightforward. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ahr/@50.4656006,6.9512367,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipNtCrDTHlxgFS-lEkHt1krN1x9OrMePtdwtFr1R!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNtCrDTHlxgFS-lEkHt1krN1x9OrMePtdwtFr1R%3Dw203-h135-k-no!7i3888!8i2592!4m7!3m6!1s0x47bef1191ad419f7:0x9735ef527fac025b!8m2!3d50.4656006!4d6.9512367!14m1!1BCgIgAQ
The city of Hagen was flooded for the last time in 1961, well “within living memory”, with just seven or eight inches lower than this year’s top level. In other words, similar damages then (my wife’s parents remember well from first-hand experience), but the press will only report that this year’s flood was “higher than ever before”. Well, technically it may have been, but only by a couple inches that made no difference for the majority of people and houses affected.
Remember, climate measurements to the 0.01 unit are all important!
So, if nothing else, the “ higher then ever before” could have been human error caused by the reservoirs being left
“fuller then ever before” before a predicted heavy rain event.
Modern Germans have been trained to wait for those in authority to tell them what to do.
Jawohl!
Apparently they do have a national flood warning system (thats a clue that its not uncommon).
This story in WSJ talks about how the meteorologists predicted the extreme weather – for that small area- in advance, but then….
‘The alarming forecast, which soon proved to be accurate, was picked up by the agency’s on-duty meteorologist who promptly triggered the country’s sophisticated flood alert system at 6 a.m., notifying at once the government, the emergency services, the police and key media about the looming catastrophe”.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-opposition-politicians-blame-government-for-ignoring-flood-warnings-11626694101
The large rivers going through Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai or Wuhan have riverbanks up to 400-500 meters wide. They are used for recreational purposes with no permanent structures apart from some tables and benches made of concrete. When the 300 mm rain per hour typhoon strikes they are flooded, but people live safely behind the walls of the riverbanks.
well, in theory yes. But I have seen horrible videos of dam breaks coming out of china, despite the Great Internet Wall
In the flooded area, there are (or now rather were) several whole villages, train lines and highways within 500 meters of riverbanks. Not all of them _large_ rivers, but of course that made them, if anything, _more_ prone to swelling immensely than the big streams, because the short-term amount added by the rain was huge compared to their usual water volume.
This is exactly what happened in Cumbria during the November 2009 floods.
United Utilities were accused of allowing the revervoirs to overflow for 3 weeks prior to the devastating Cumbria floods.
Solicitor Kevin Commons, 60, was a senior partner at KJ Commons & Co solicitors and was representing residents in a law suit against United Utilities.
Solicitor Kevin Commons also happened to be the first of 13 victims all allegedly murdered by the alleged perp, Derrick Bird, in a “shooting spree” on June 2, 2010 …
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=147802#147802
MG
Sorry MG. No.
There were/are no significant dams or water control measures above the town of Cockermouth (the Cumbria 2009 flood)
That flood was caused by a double whammy:
Put those two together= lotsa rain falling onto little more than bare rock and the streams, becks, sykes and rivers simply turned into something akin the waste-pipe below your toilet when you flush it.
Nobody and nothing downstream had a chance.
Not even a lawyer
yes. The lawyer would get fees for a case with almost no chance of success against the people who operate water supply reservoirs….thats what insurance for flood damage is for …let me guess these claimants had no insurance
Not longtime ago we were told to become out of drink water, live in the 4th year of a drought, but the dams are full.
Can’t finish that puzzle…
The simplified bureaucratic liberal’s playbook.
They’re hoping someone like Joshua or Moses will come along and part the waters, so that they don’t have to do anything, but can take credit for it all.
Always remember that matzo was the original hardtack.
And it is good with peanut butter and grape jam. 🙂
….. and they’re not beyond manslaughtering a few plebs either to keep the phony crisis going.
Nothing more than the standard procedure of liberals. Blame others and always include CLIMATE CHANGE. {PUPPETS UNITE}.
Now they want to hide their gross incompetence
I’m not convinced, myself, that this is just incompetence.
Me neither. The added bonus of a bit of depopulation too.
Can’t Waste that FREE ENERGY.
>> Dereliction of duty?
Maybe the experts and technicians controlling the water level typically face a similar problem as Lake Mead, when it does not rain much in summers in that region! Germany had a few dry summers in the recent years and keeping the water level up saving the resource while producing more electric energy was a strong incentive.. until it went wrong..
Guessing they kept dams full to maximize hydro electric generation. Trying to maximize green energy. I would count those deaths as renewable energy deaths.
The concept of water management suggests that somebody is, well, managing. Controlling the water level in an impound area is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. What happened last year has no bearing on what’s happening in the next 4 days.
Flood control dams should be as a design feature be normally empty as they have a restricted outlet to allow the water out over a week or month as appropriate.
If the dam is full and its not just had a major flood its not flood control its water storage for a range of reasons..often because that brings in money. Flood control doesnt bring in any money
In a world of infinite resources, that might make sense. Maybe. However, trains to nowhere in California notwithstanding, no politician could survive by banging this drum. The only way you can get a dam approved is showing multiple uses whose benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
IS this anything like the Johnstown flood? https://damfailures.org/case-study/south-fork-dam-pennsylvania-1889/
Only asking, because negligence and poor management added to the dam failure, when it could have been prevented.
I think Merkel should be sent packing, along with all the cronies who hang onto her like glue. Fire her and start over and get some REAL engineers in there.
Over here in the sticks, when the Mississippie starts to even vaguely approach flood stage, the Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t wait for and OK from some government bureaucrat. They just go do their job.
She’s retiring. Election in September
With the Greens and the Socialists already standing in line to take over. Merkel seems a minor problem in comparison to all available alternatives….
The Federal Government there isnt responsible for local water supply- flood control . They have states and districts who handle that. There is no US style Army Corps of Engineers
The flooding fits into the climate change agenda. The ends justify the means.
Merkel is not running for re-election, so the temptation to blame her would not have much traction. But the hard core greens trying to rely on “renewable” energy are probably responsible.
People in big organizations find ways to not take responsibility for screw ups. Currently the scape goat is climate change.
Germany has elections in September. After the demise of Merkel they want to install an outright and official socialist regime with the green party in the lead. The media outlets heavily exploit the “climate disaster” as proof of man-made climate change and totalitarian socialism as the only remedy.
Of course they did not warn anyone to mitigate damage and loss of lifes. Equally they had no intent using dams to counter the floods. I would not even be suprised if they helped nature with a little bit of silver iodide. Just another Gleiwitz incident when needed..
I wish Wattsupwiththat was on instagram and other social media, this site saved me from the climate anxiety I had, and after the floods, I patiently waited for a post to explain why the floods were so bad, as the news media, harps on the normal “climate change” route… Now I know the truth, Thank you for this post
Hanlon’s Razor “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” (sometimes stated as “incompetence” instead)
I’m beginning to think we’re far beyond mere incompetence or stupidity. At what point does repeated stupidity become malicious?
The thing to aim for, broadest sense, is “Buck Passing”
i.e. The avoidance of responsibility coupled with mendacity.
In olden days folks would find their heads on spikes for less.
As a measure of how crazy things really are nowadays, Mr Trump found his head on a (metaphorical) spike exactly because he was honest and didn’t pass the buck.
None of us would trust them to baby-sit our pet bunny-rabbit yet here they are permanently installed in Government.
what went so badly wrong