A quarter of a year after the flash flood in the Ahr valley with 133 deaths, the traumatic night can still be clearly seen. Parts of the villages are barely recognizable. In addition, there is concern about the future.
80-year-old Gerd Gasper and his wife Elfriede from the Ahr valley are trying to prepare for a long transition period.
The Stodden family of winemakers still has no hot water. Manuela Göken and Daniel Schmitz have started again. The train driver Peter Filz now has to drive a different route. And Wolfgang Ewerts wants to celebrate Christmas in his house again.
Three months after the flood disaster from July 14th to 15th, many houses in the Ahr valley have been torn down and large parts of the villages can no longer be seen. “Nobody is here in the evening, and there is no light anywhere,” says Gerd Gasper in his completely gutted house in Altenahr-Altenburg. Many houses or floors have been moved back into the shell, drying devices are running everywhere. Mountains of rubbish are shredded, free areas are leveled and the banks of the Ahr are restored in places. In between, some people plant flowers.
The Gaspers can’t get the horror night in which the masses of water destroyed all their belongings and covered them with thick, foul-smelling mud. “We have nothing left, except what we were wearing,” says Gerd Gasper, pointing to his only pair of shoes. “To cope with that properly, you would have to be 20 years younger,” adds the 80-year-old. “We had everything ready for old age.”
It will take at least a month for the walls to dry. Then craftsmen would have to be found. You should expect one and a half to two years for the entire renovation of your house, says Elfriede Gasper. Until then, the couple can stay with their daughter and her family – a few kilometers from the Ahr. Because there is not that much space there, the Gaspers spend the night in a holiday apartment. They check on their house every day. Gerd Gasper’s parents’ house, right next door, where his brother Bernd lived with his wife, had to be torn down.
Many residents of the disaster region keep crying when they talk about what they experienced and what they have before them. They lie awake at night pondering what’s going to happen next, what they can do next – and what they can rebuild with the aid money. “A whole valley is gone, everything is broken for over 40 kilometers,” says Gasper. More than 40,000 people are affected.
The rescue with helicopters only on the afternoon of July 15th stuck the Gaspers in the bones. And yet: “We want to go back, we’ve been here for over 50 years,” says Elfriede Gasper. The couple have had natural hazard insurance for decades and have never used it before. Is the insurance paying off now? “You have to prove so much, but you have nothing left,” says Gerd Gasper. “We hope!” He says sadly. “We can use every penny.”
Vintner Alexander Stodden and his family from the wine town of Rech drive 15 to 20 kilometers to visit friends and take a shower. The family of five still does not have hot water because there are no spare parts for the heating. The internet is weak, landline calls are still impossible, but the cell phone works.
Because the school is no longer there, the children have to go to Remagen, a good 20 kilometers away. Classes are usually in the afternoon when the other students are already off, with homeschooling in between. “But video conferencing is not possible with the Internet,” says Stodden. He also sees an opportunity for the Ahr Valley in reconstruction: “We can become a model region!” Especially when it comes to sustainability.
He puts the damage in his family business from 1900 – the red wine estate Jean Stodden – at around 1.5 million euros. Stodden says he has not yet had time to apply for reconstruction aid after the wine cellars have been desludged and the grapes have been harvested. “This time we physically started the harvest in the same state in which we would otherwise have stopped.”
He also had to get replacements for his 150 barrique barrels and the 20 large barrels that were floating in the oily water after the flood. Applications for financial aid can only be submitted online, and the Internet is not yet sufficient for this. A lot is still unclear financially: “They always say you get 80 percent, but of what? From the book value, the sales value or the new price? »
Every day Peter Filz passes by the regional train, which was destroyed by the water and which has been standing on the embankment at Altenahr-Kreuzberg station since the evening of July 14 and cannot be transported away. “The manufacturer will probably have to come and dismantle the train into individual parts on site,” says Filz. In the signal box of the small station building next door it still smells of oily mud.
The destroyed route through the idyllic Ahr valley was his regular route and he particularly liked it, says train driver Filz, who has also been in the driver’s cab in other parts of the world. “It was so beautiful and picturesque and the people incredibly nice.”
His colleague turned off the regional train at around 8 p.m. on the evening of the flood and with a lot of luck survived the night of the disaster together with a neighbor from Filz on the roof of a carport. Illuminated caravans from the directly adjoining campsite drove past them and smashed a few meters further on the bridge, in some of which people were still sitting.
“I was lucky,” says Filz. The shock over the 133 deaths in the catastrophe, the many injured, the extent of the destruction and the suffering runs deep. He therefore had to break off and postpone his start of work on another railway line.
Manuela Göken and her partner Daniel Schmitz gutted their rented and badly damaged house in Insul for ten weeks. “You don’t just knock 16 years in the bin and the wonderfully beautiful area,” says the 50-year-old. But then it became clear that there was no insurance and that the renovation of the damp and cold house would take a long time.
For this reason, they would at least have looked for something “temporarily” via the community’s platform, on which living space is also offered. They came across a house from 1920 with a garden above the Ahr – about 20 kilometers by road and six kilometers as the crow flies from Insul. “From 200 to 70 square meters and in great need of renovation,” says Göken, describing the initial situation. “It stood empty unheated for four years and was only used as accommodation for hunters.” And yet: “We fell in love with the house.”
Since then, the two have put all of their free time into the renovation and have applied for money from the reconstruction fund. “But that’s very complicated, and I’m used to something like that,” says Göken. “How are old people supposed to do that?” There are info points everywhere in the Ahr Valley, where specialists also help with filling out the applications, and now there are also numerous citizens’ assemblies. But by no means all those affected make it there.
Göken himself is optimistic: “We only cry out of euphoria and about what has been left behind.” A psychological discussion group did her and her partner very well. On the night of the flood, she thought he was dead – and found out from a photo by the German press agency on the Internet that he was alive. Göken has not yet drawn a line under life on the Ahr: “We still have a lot of friends in Insul, we are not gone down there.”
Hotelier Ewerts is renovating his own bungalow, a tenement house and the hotel with restaurant in Insul. “It works, but it just takes time,” he says. He wants to be finished with the two houses by Christmas. Since the flood he has lived with his wife in the house of his deceased in-laws in the neighboring village.
The plaster on the ground floor of the hotel has meanwhile been chipped off and new windows have been added. The oldest part of the building complex, his parents’ house, has now been demolished because of the flood damage. But everything should be back in operation by April. “Otherwise we will have financial problems.”
The insurance company paid a discount for the hotel, but how far does it pay? He got 5000 euros for his beer garden. “That’s not even enough for the seating.” And he has no natural hazard insurance for the two houses. He still sees many question marks when it comes to financial matters. “When we’ve got everything, I can tell you how things went financially,” says Ewerts. “We’re happy if we get away with a black eye.”