During the flood disaster in North Rhine-Westphalia in mid-July, the state government made mistakes. Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) admitted that in retrospect on Monday. As an example, Reul cited the decision not to convene a nationwide crisis team, although the floods in the southern Rhineland rose rapidly on July 14.
This decision, according to Reul, he made that day after consulting Prime Minister Armin Laschet (CDU): “We agreed not to set up a crisis team,” said Reul at a press conference in Düsseldorf. He had agreed with the Prime Minister that a coordination group of experts set up in the Ministry of the Interior on the same day would be sufficient. This so-called small crisis team “worked great”.
In the flood, 48 people were killed in North Rhine-Westphalia alone, especially in the Rhineland between Aachen and Cologne. The flood of the century was caused by heavy rain that lasted for days, which in the cities of Stolberg, Euskirchen and Erftstadt, for example, caused small rivers to swell into torrential rivers and destroyed entire streets. Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser (CDU) announced that, as was the case on the Rhine, an early warning and forecast system would now be created that should sound an earlier and more reliable alarm of future floods.
In Düsseldorf, the black and yellow state government is facing growing criticism from the opposition five weeks after the flood. The SPD and the Greens criticize the lack of a crisis team: A body at ministerial level – instead of at the level of specialist officials – would have been a signal to the population in their opinion and could have acted more effectively. In addition, the opposition complains that the government gave the cities and districts too little and too little support in assessing the dangers.
Armin Laschets State Secretary is said not to have forwarded situation reports
Interior Minister Reul has meanwhile admitted such a “symbolic effect” of a crisis team. He also named a problem that the coordination and the flow of information between flood experts on the one hand and disaster relief workers on the other hand did not initially work optimally at the state level. After massive warnings from the German Weather Service and the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (Lanuv), a so-called small crisis team was created in the Ministry of the Interior on July 14th – just hours before the peak of the floods in the southern Rhineland. However, no water expert from the Ministry of the Environment attended the first meeting on Wednesday afternoon. The head of department responsible was not invited until the next day, on Thursday.
On top of that, the disaster relief workers in the Ministry of the Interior did not initially have the so-called “hydrological situation reports” from the Ministry of the Environment. These documents provided an assessment of the approaching flood situation. Environment Minister Heinen-Esser now stated that she had forwarded these situation reports to the head of the State Chancellery, State Secretary Nathanael Liminski, from July 14th as part of her regular contacts. Liminski, who is considered the closest confidante and right-hand man of Prime Minister Armin Laschet, did not forward these reports to the “small crisis team”, according to a spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Ministry. Later versions of the situation reports were then received directly from the Ministry of the Environment and the State Office.
The responsible district government reacted relatively late
On the other hand, according to Minister Heinen-Esser, the flow of information to the threatened cities and districts should have worked as planned. The “hydrological situation reports” of their ministry were sent from the Lanuv State Office to the five district governments in the state and from there passed on to the town halls and district administrations.
However, the provisional balance sheet by the state government on Monday reveals that the district government responsible for the disaster area between Cologne and Aachen reacted comparatively late. A flood reporting center was not set up there (later than elsewhere) until the evening of July 13th at 9:30 pm, and the district government did not set up its “Storm Crisis Management” until the early evening of July 14th. At that time, for example, the city of Stolberg near Aachen was already under water. Patrick Haas, the local mayor, has been calling on the residents since 3:45 p.m. to evacuate the city center near the now raging Vichtbach.
Additional doubts about the crisis management in North Rhine-Westphalia aroused on Monday a report by the broadcaster WDR about failures in the collective municipality of Erftstadt. Accordingly, the local fire brigade should not have responded to flood warnings from the Erft Association responsible for water management for up to 20 hours. That is why many residents were surprised by the flood in their sleep on the morning of July 15. All communication channels of the fire brigade would have failed. When the firefighters advanced to their tool shed in the morning, a large part of the equipment was already unusable.