Bavaria severely affected – flooding: closure of shipping on the Danube

Parts of southern Germany remain flooded; The areas on the Danube in Bavaria are particularly hard hit. Several districts and the cities of Passau and Regensburg declared disaster.

Woman slid car into water
A woman died in Allgäu when her car slid into the water. The 57-year-old is the fifth known fatality. Several people remained missing on Tuesday. It is unlikely that more rain will fall: “From a meteorological point of view, the ‘all-clear’ can now be given for the south of Germany,” explains DWD meteorologist Robert Hausen. A few showers and thunderstorms are possible in the flood areas, but these will not be severe weather conditions.

The peaks, i.e. the highest water levels of the flood, were expected on Tuesday at different depth gauges along the Danube. According to the Flood Intelligence Agency, water levels should remain below previous values. Between Kelheim and Passau, water levels are expected to be above the highest reported level 4 until Wednesday.

The old town of Passau flooded
In Passau, where the three rivers Danube, Inn and Ilz meet, the riverbank area with the first row of houses in the old town is flooded. The city is often particularly hard hit by floods. Regensburg, located upstream of the Danube, is similar. We still have “one or two days of real tension and real worries” ahead of us, as Mayor Gertrud Maltz-Schwarzfischer (SPD) said. Although the water level is lower than in previous floods, the water is draining more slowly. On Monday evening, houses on a street on the Danube were evacuated because the ground was soft and the protective walls were in danger of slipping.

The woman waited in the treetop
However, around noon there was already a happy turn of events in the case of a missing 32-year-old in Swabia: she was discovered and rescued with a search drone. In the flooded forest near Neu-Ulm, she had taken refuge in a treetop on Sunday evening and remained hanging about two meters above the water, police said. When emergency services finally found her after two and a half days, the tide was still about chest height under the tree.

According to preliminary data, more rain has fallen in several places in southern Germany in recent days than every 50 to 100 years. You could speak of rainfall that occurs once in a century, says meteorologist Thomas Deutschländer of the DWD. “That is special, but not completely extraordinary.” About twenty to thirty measuring stations showed such particularly high values ​​– especially from a region northeast of Augsburg, almost to Lake Constance. Some extreme values ​​refer to rainfall on one day, others to rainfall on three consecutive days.

“Far from normal”
The flood situation in Baden-Württemberg is already improving. Cleaning work takes place there. “We are still far from normality,” said a city spokeswoman in the affected community of Ebersbach an der Fils. In many places, residents, together with emergency services and volunteers, were busy removing the worst dirt from the streets, pumping out even more cellars or cleaning up waste.

Because thousands of helpers are still working against the floods. They often fought against the masses of water until they were completely exhausted and risked their lives to rescue people from flooded houses, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin, thanking them. He would also like to thank the many citizens “who spontaneously help and lend a hand where the catastrophe is greatest, fill sandbags, care for evacuees or offer comfort.”