Daily Mail
Thousands of villagers in western German were praying for a miracle Friday night amid fears a nearby dam could collapse and inundate their homes with water.
The villages in the Euskirchen region, near the city of Bonn, have been evacuated with 4,500 told to flee their homes after cracks started appearing in the dam holding back the nearby Steinbach reservoir.
Engineers warned the dam is dangerously close to collapse after a huge amount of water was dumped into the reservoir as three months’ worth of rain fell on the region in just one week, causing widespread devastation.
The dam is designed to vent excess water, but its drainage system has been blocked by debris including trees and rubble from destroyed buildings. The strain was clearly visible Friday as huge cracks appeared in the soil reinforcing the front of the dam.
It is just the latest episode in the evolving weather crisis in central Europe, with more than 120 people killed across Germany and Belgium in some of the worst flooding in decades with more than 1,000 still missing.
By Friday afternoon, the death toll in Germany alone stood at 106 marking the country’s deadliest floods since at least 1962 when more than 300 people were killed in flooding in Hamburg.
However, there were fears that toll could rise considerably with more than 1,000 people still missing, mostly from the hard-hit Ahrweiler region, south of Bonn, where whole villages were destroyed as the Ahr river broke its banks.
At least another 23 people were killed in neighbouring Belgium where a ‘tsunami-like’ torrent of water inundated parts of Leige and Verviers, causing the Meuse and Vesdre rivers to burst their banks.
Such is the scale of the devastation and human tragedy that economic cost-counting has barely even begun, though one German official said bluntly that the cost is certainly in the ‘billions’.
