Around two weeks after the flood disaster in the Ahr valley with at least 134 dead, there is no end in sight to the clean-up work. People draw hope again, but also fight with tears.
Insul / Altenahr / Schuld – When Manuela Göken discovered the dpa photo of a man on a water tank on the Internet the day after the devastating tidal wave in the Ahr Valley, she initially couldn’t believe her eyes. It is her husband – Daniel Schmitz – in the flooded island before the rubble of the catastrophe.
“That was the very first sign of life that I had from him,” said the restaurateur two weeks later in tears in front of her damaged house.
Telephone, cell phone, internet and the access roads to the village on the Ahr were destroyed after the tidal wave. “This is the most important photo in my whole life,” says Göken.
In the meantime the cell phone network is working to some extent and there is water. Most of the muddy mountains of rubbish have been removed and the Bundeswehr is currently building a makeshift bridge next to the destroyed arched bridge over the Ahr. In between there are still a number of – provisionally fenced – completely dilapidated houses. Before that, the remains of the bank that had cracked and washed over, the houses are gone.
Day of the disaster
On the day of the disaster on July 14th, Göken is at work in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, about 45 kilometers away. First she stayed with a friend in Sinzig, then drives around 24 hours to somehow get home. Finally she reaches the other bank of the Ahr in Insul and sees her husband in front of the common house.
But all shouting and waving is useless – the distance is too great, the water too loud, all bridges destroyed. “I couldn’t see them,” says Schmitz. Only hours later, about two days after the start of the devastating rains, the couple finally embrace each other in the neighboring town of Hönningen.
“We have each other again, everything else can be replaced,” says Göken around two weeks later. The basement and the ground floor of the house are uninhabitable, the furnishings and the garden have been destroyed. “But our three cats came back after eight days,” reports Göken. “We are now setting up comfortably on the upper floor.”
“In the first two days I could have run away,” reports hotelier Wolfgang Ewerts, a few hundred meters away. “Meanwhile, I am convinced that we can do it.” Actually, he and his wife wanted to slowly withdraw from the business that his mother founded in 1974 with three small private rooms, says the trained chef. “At first I didn’t see the strength to rebuild everything. Now I have it, but only because my son is in the business. ”The 28-year-old is a trained hotel manager and also lives in Insul.
Kitchen and dining room completely destroyed
The lower floor of the hotel with kitchen and dining room as well as the beer garden on the Ahr have been completely destroyed. Everything has to be put back into the shell, but the building can stand still. The reception is being canceled. Volunteers stay overnight in the rooms on the first floor. “There is an absolute gratitude for the people who have helped here. I would never have thought that possible. “
The 53-year-old reports that he invested tens of thousands of euros in the hotel during the Corona period and fortunately had an elementary insurance. But he didn’t lock it for his new home. He only moved in with his wife in November. “A bungalow is age-appropriate, but the disadvantage is that everything is under water.” He also lost three cars in the floods, “all of my office documents, photo albums – everything is gone”.
However, he was able to save the caravan, in which he wanted to celebrate her birthday with his wife, so he was initially not there on the night of the floods. He can’t get the deafening din that received him out of his head: masses of water that sweep entire caravans and tanks with them. “What violence,” says Ewers, who learned to swim in the river as a child.
Emergency aid does not make up for millions in damages
Like most of them, Ewers applied for immediate aid. But what are the 1,000 to 3,500 euros in view of the millions in damage in his family alone? “But it hit tens of thousands,” he says.
The noises, the cold, the darkness: “I thought that was it now,” says Maria Günzel from Altenahr-Altenburg, which was particularly hard hit. Tears come to her too when she talks about the night of July 15th, which she and her husband Wolfgang spent in the attic of their house – around 250 meters from the Ahr.
“The water kept rising, at some point we opened the skylight and we’re up,” he reports. They only took a few clothes with them, important papers were in the attic. “Everything else is gone and no longer exists,” says Wolfgang Günzel, who, like some in the flood area, has been released from his employer for the first time. They tried to wash some things, “but even after washing twice it still smelled of oil”.
Everywhere remains of the brown water flood
Only eight houses in the district with its around 500 inhabitants got away undamaged. Including one of Maria Günzel’s sister, which is a little higher. Her parents’ house, on the other hand, has already had to be torn down, a number of other houses are still to come. The remains of the brown flood of water can still be seen everywhere – on the access road meter-high mountains of rubbish are piled up from children’s things, fully equipped caravans, trees, stuffed animals, crushed belongings.
Rolf Gasner, whose family is also affected with several houses, describes his impressions of the citizens’ meeting in the evacuated district while shoveling the mud. “We are afraid that politics will forget us.” Because Altenburg is almost never mentioned in contrast to, for example, Schuld or Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler.
He already felt left alone on the night of the disaster: “We stood up on the roof and called,” he says calmly about the late Wednesday evening. “There was no rescue.” The first helicopters did not arrive until Thursday afternoon – due to the weather conditions, they could not take off earlier. “It wasn’t until the helicopters came that I realized that we were going to be evacuated,” says the driving instructor. He’ll have to go back to work soon and is looking for an apartment. “But everyone is now looking for an apartment.” His two uncles Bernd and Gerd are also staying separately outside the village – their parents’ house is threatened with demolition.
“Horror Night” in debt
The noises of the destructive floods of the Ahr do not let go of Bianca Wurst either, who spent the “night of horror” alone with her cat in the attic in Schuld, a few kilometers away. “Gas tanks drove by and there were cars in which people were still sitting,” she says – still visibly shocked. “The house shook.”
Her husband Christoph says: “A forklift truck was swept into the corner of the house.” Two weeks after the disaster there is still water and mud in the cellar, but the half-timbered house from the 17th century survived the flood better than Quite a few new buildings in the neighborhood – even if the construction vehicle tore down a whole corner.
At the beginning of the 19th and 20th centuries, his parents’ house was exposed to strong floods, reports Wurst. This time, however, so much debris was carried away. They would have stopped the water on bridges and dammed it meters high – certainly one reason for the eight-meter-high wave, he says.
“We were separated within ten minutes,” remembers his wife Bianca. When the masses of water came, she ran back into the house to fetch some important documents and the wallets. At that moment, her husband had to get to safety in front of the barn door drifting past him and the tractor. “You can’t get these images out of your head,” he says. “In the first week I didn’t sleep an hour at a time.”
Nonetheless: “We both hang on to the house and stay – for now,” says Bianca Wurst. Fortunately, Wolfgang Günzel also has elementary insurance, but reckons that it will take up to two years before he and his wife can return to the house in Altenburg. Hotelier Ewerts says: “My goal is to be back at the start in a year at the most.” Göken and Schmitz rent and are thinking of leaving. “Our baby was our garden,” says Göken. “I loved every stone and I knew exactly where each plant came from.” There is nothing left of it: the masses of water carried everything away and left only mud behind. dpa
