When the Ahr River burst its banks in 2021, 188 people died and whole villages and towns were destroyed. Could it all happen again?
hen the waters rose, Meike and Dörte Näkel weren’t worried. People in this part of the world, the Ahr valley in Germany, are used to it. The river flooded in 2016, bursting its banks and, and before that in 2013, 1910 and 1804. Many lives were lost in 1804 and 1910, in catastrophes remembered only in stories read from history books to bored schoolchildren. The sisters’ great-grandmother Anna MeyerThey are the fifth generation of their family to make wine in the village of Dernau.
Entire buildings were washed away with their inhabitants trapped inside. Bodies were found as far away as Rotterdam, 150 miles north-west. Steffi Nelles, 48, the owner of Haus Caspari, a family-owned guesthouse on the main square in Altenahr, watched in horror from her upstairs window as the house across from her was wrenched from its foundations with an elderly couple stuck inside. She didn’t know if her building would be next.
“So, we have no plan for what to do now,” she says, blinking back tears. “This is my parents’ house. We made this plan and everything was going to be finished for them and they were looking forward to it. They’re in their late 70s. They can’t really understand it.”After the floods, when the entire German press decamped to the Ahr, Nelles’ neighbours gave interviews and started crowdfunding pages that raised thousands of euros. “You think you’re so stupid,” says Nelles.
The sisters have invested in better windows, relocated a lift, blocked up their basement windows and built a small wall to go around the perimeter of the guesthouse. But it won’t protect them from another flood of the magnitude of 2021’s – they know that. So much expense to rebuild. All that equipment in their basement. And the Ahr scarcely three metres away.here is a well-known term in hydrological circles: flood dementia.
The flood of 14 July was particularly catastrophic for multiple reasons. It was the summer, so no one was prepared for it. It happened during the night-time. The authorities failed to issue warnings and mandatory evacuations until it was too late. But it was more than that. The Ahr had not flooded with significant loss of life for more than 100 years. People weren’t prepared. And their homes had been built in places that never should have been inhabited, let alone densely populated.
Their father, Werner, had already taught them that winemakers should think not in years, or even decades, but generations. A vineyard will take five years before it produces its first yield and a decade before the yield is of any quality. “The older the vines, the better the wine will be,” says Meike. The week before we meet, Dörte and Meike replanted a vineyard Werner planted with his father when he was 18.
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