Another environmental crisis

The flash floods in West Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands were the worst in Europe for decades. By Thursday, July 22, the death toll in Rhineland-Palatinate (RP) and North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) stood at 179, but with thousands more missing, the number was still rising daily. In Belgium, at least two dozen had been killed in the Liège region with many more reported missing. In the province of Limburg in the Netherlands, 10,000 people were evacuated as the authorities feared that if the Maas (Meuse) broke its banks, urban residential areas would be flooded. Also in Perl, in Saarland, the Mosel was more than double its usual level.

By Friday 16 July, 114,000 households in Germany were without electricity. Entire villages were cut off because bridges, roads, bridges and railway tracks became impassable, either covered with water or entirely destroyed.

The worst affected areas were those in the Eifel region, and in particular communities along the River Ahr, a western tributary of the Rhine south of Bonn. The village of Schuld (population 660) in the Ahrweiler district, which is located on several loops in the Ahr, was largely destroyed. In many other places along the Ahr in the eastern Eifel, the houses are flooded, partially or completely destroyed, or in danger of imminent. People were left without drinking water as well as without electricity.

A particularly tragic case occurred in Sinzig, which is located at the confluence of the Ahr and the Rhine. Twelve people died in a dormitory for the severely disabled as a result of the flood. They lived in a house belonging to the Ahrweiler branch of the federal self-help organization, Lebenshilfe. The ground floor of the dormitory was flooded by the sharp rise in the Ahr in the night from Wednesday to Thursday. The residents were not evacuated in time and could not save themselves. In total, at least 362 people were reported as injured in Ahrweiler.

The situation in the village of Erftstadt-Blessem on the River Erft was especially desperate. Several houses and a part of the historic castle collapsed. Firefighters tried in vain to reach people buried in the houses. Aerial photos showed what appeared to be a massive sinkhole. The Erft, also a tributary on the left bank of the Rhine, is 107 km long. It is normally a small, narrow river but developed into a raging torrent as a result of the heavy rainfall. On top of this, a lake broke its banks, adding to the spate. Large areas of land have were inundated and crops destroyed. Volunteers took care of evacuated in emergency shelters. This also raised the threat of a new outbreak of Covid-19 infections.

Another badly affected district was Euskirchen, south of Cologne. As well as its many rivers and rivulets, there are numerous streams in the area, especially in the Münstereifel forest to the south, on whose ridges the watershed of the Erft and the Ahr is located. There were concerns that the nearby dam – the Steinbachtalsperre – would break, which would have completely flooded several mid-sized towns. Consequently many residents were evacuated. The situation in villages in many valleys in the area remained critical.

In NRW 23 villages were flooded. Cities impacted included Cologne, Leverkusen, Solingen, Hagen, Aachen, Düren and Trier. The regions worse affected were, in addition to the Eifel, Bergisches Land (east of Cologne), Sauerland, and the southeastern Ruhrgebiet. The full extent of the damage will not be known for weeks or months. But in many towns and districts it is certainly on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Many people pitched in to help out, including hundreds of members of the voluntary fire brigades. The government sent around 900 soldiers.

The Eifel - a cursed land

Many ask themselves how can such a disaster happen in such an advanced part of the world as West Germany? The answer lies in part, of course, in the extreme weather caused by the climate change. Scientists have long been warning of its effects, which are causing unprecedented heat and drought in Canada and the western USA, for example. In Europe, the massive downpours can be attributed to the warmed atmosphere, which can absorb significantly more moisture than before. In the German-speaking Belgian border towns of Jalhay and Spa, 271 mm and 217 mm of rain was recorded in just 48 hours. Normally, the total rainfall for the entire month of July is around 100 mm.

But this alone does not explain why it struck here, with such intensity. To explain this, we need to consider the combination of geographical factors and the uneven development of the capitalist economy.

Straddling RP and NRW and crossing over into the Ardennes, the Eifel is one of the most beautiful regions of Germany, but it is also largely a desolate, empty wilderness, a high plateau with rolling heath and moorlands followed by vast expanses of dark green woodland, with, here and there, a black “Maar” – a volcanic lake. There is a tradition that the people of the Eifel themselves believed the region to be “cursed”, and indeed, it has been hit by a succession of tragedies down the centuries. In the Middle Ages the region was prosperous, with several monasteries, but in the early modern times it was surrounded by four superpowers – the Empire, France, the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Spanish Netherlands – each of which was looking to extend its own borders, or those of its local clients, to make them more defensible. During the Thirty Years’ War, the Eifel lay on the so-called “Spanish Road” and the population was expected to provide billets, bread, meat, wheat and beer for the marching armies. Many villages all but disappeared. Further devastation was visited upon the region by hysteria about witchcraft, the predatory wars of Louis XIV, the Wars of Spanish and Polish Succession, and recurring outbreaks of disease.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, plague ravaged the north and west Eifel and the Ahr valley, destroying many villages. As land ownership consolidated, a monocultural agriculture was encouraged among the tenant farmers, based on the potato; but as in Ireland, this misfired when harvests failed as a result of poor weather and crop disease. Large tracts of countryside were transformed into endless juniper heaths, the only plant tough enough to survive wandering flocks of hungry sheep. As the land depopulated the long roads through became vulnerable to highwaymen, so the roads too fell into disuse and were gradually abandoned.

A slight glimmer of hope appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. The French arrived on the scene – but this time as liberators, not as oppressors. After 1794 the Eifel became part of the Ourthe department of the First Republic. The Church and feudal lords were stripped of their powers, and for the first time in history ordinary people in the Eifel had civil rights. They no longer had to do compulsory labor or pay unjust taxes. A modest economic upswing took place; new markets opened up for the old Eifel industries: quarries, iron and lead mines again took up production on a large scale.

All this came to an end after the Napoleonic Wars when the Eifel region was given to Prussia under the terms of the Congress of Vienna. Some of the wasteland was reforested with non-native pine and spruce. But the Prussian government omitted to do the one thing that might have saved the region from further ruin: it did not develop a network of communications through this mountainous countryside; this could have enabled the metal industry, which had re-emerged under the French, to benefit from new smelting technologies through the import of coal and coke, and to export in greater quantities.

Instead, the last of the huge beech forests were cut down to produce charcoal – whose use had died out elsewhere in Europe. When the iron industry finally collapsed (at its height, the Eifel produced 10% of Europe’s iron) thousands lost their only source of income, coinciding with the great famines caused by rained-out and frozen harvests. The Eifel became known as the “Prussian Siberia”. As in Ireland, insult was added to injury; the people were blamed for their own misfortunes, characterized as “the hungry boarders” of the Kingdom of Prussia. The Eifel disappeared from public consciousness as a land with its own culture and identity.

The Eifel then became depopulated. Between 1834 and 1911, 140,000 people, almost half of the entire population, emigrated to America. Abject poverty, repeated crop failures, mandatory military service in the Prussian army – and not least, the failure of the revolution of 1848-9 to drive out the parasitical aristocracy – all helped convert a trickle into a flood of emigrants. Nearly all headed to the American mid-west. They settled in four major destinations: McHenry County, Illinois, Clinton County, Michigan, eastern Wisconsin including Fond du Lac and Brown Counties, and Lorain County, Ohio. Among other things, these immigrants filled the ranks of the Wisconsin and Illinois regiments of the Union army in the Civil War.

The Eifel now had nothing to offer the German bourgeoisie other than a way of delaying any possible French invasion. Further south in the Prussian Rhineland, the rich flood plains were ideal for large-scale capitalist agriculture, in particular to grow the potatoes that fed the German working class; to the north-east, heavy industry was established along the lower Rhine and the tributaries on the right bank, the Ruhr and Lippe. But the Eifel remained sparsely populated and the infrastructure undeveloped right up until the 21st century. Even today, the main economic activity, aside from tapping the mountain streams for mineral water and brewing, is tourism.

It is a region bisected by numerous small but fast-flowing rivers and streams, tributaries of the Rhine to the east and the Maas (Meuse) to the west, and many lakes, with very poor drainage. It lacks the flood plains that protect the more developed and densely populated areas near the industrialized waterways of Germany.

Consequently, when the flash floods struck, the water had nowhere to go, and it was impossible to evacuate people from many towns along the tributaries of the Rhine and in isolated villages. In the narrow valleys of the Eifel, the narrow streams turned into raging rivers within hours or even minutes after days of intense rainfall, giving people absolutely no hope of escape.

Later in the week similar, though less devastating floods hit Saxony, Upper Bavaria and Austria. Worst affected was the county of Berchtesgadener Land bordering Austria, with at least two people killed and many houses destroyed by landslides rising water levels.

Floods in China and Turkey

Other floods have caused disasters in areas of the world that capitalism has transformed rapidly in recent years, but without the essential infrastructure to protect them against the effects of climate change and natural disasters.

Thousands of people remained trapped in areas of central China after severe flooding. At least 33 people were killed in the first week, but the death toll was expected to rise as recovery crews accessed previously submerged roads and tunnels in the city of Xinxiang, Around three million people were thought to have been affected. Extreme rainstorms, which dumped a year’s worth of rain on and around the capital of Henan province, Zhengzhou, moved north, affecting exposed outer cities and rural areas, trapping people without electricity or fresh water, including those in hospitals.

China frequently experiences flooding in the summer months, but rapid urbanization, and the conversion of farmland, have exacerbated the impact of heavy rainfall.

Around 200 people had to be evacuated following floods in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region on July 21-22. The Arhavi River overflowed, badly affecting the district center and village roads in the province of Artvin. At least six people died, with two people still missing, in flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rain the previous week in the neighboring Rize province.

Floods are the second most destructive type of natural disaster in Turkey, after earthquakes. Nearly 30% of all the natural disasters in the country consist of flood events. However, according to recent studies, the risks are linked to economic developments (more assets and people exposed to floods) and hardly at all to climate change. These developments include urbanization and the switch from traditional agriculture to intensive farming of cash crops (such as tea and kiwi fruit in Rize province).

Capitalism has no solution

Undoubtedly, preventive action could have reduced the impact. Experts at the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) issued an extreme flood warning earlier in the week and questioned why the toll was so high. They called the disaster “a monumental failure of the system”. But there are also longer-term issues.

Leaving aside for a moment the obvious need to reverse climate change, the technology and hydrological know-how exists to prevent such flooding, through systems of underground canals, which were introduced in the city of Grimma in Saxony following the floods of 2002 and 2013, as well as a change in farming methods and accelerated reforestation. According to research in the UK, water sinks into the soil under trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under grass. The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground. The soil acts as a sponge, a reservoir which sucks up water and then releases it slowly.

However, in regions like the Eifel, such measures produce little or no benefit for the bourgeoisie. Federal and state resources for hydrology projects have constantly been focused on building flood defenses for the major rivers, which are important arteries of the national economy, for the transport of bulk solids such as fuel, building materials and chemicals.

Smaller communities simply don’t generate the profits and taxes required to take the necessary measures locally. The causes of this latest flood disaster are therefore clear. First, and most obviously, because of climate change. It is not simply that the capitalist class is “unable and unwilling” to tackle this challenge, as some claim. The very system itself is a monster that escapes human control. It must keep expanding production, and it must keep encouraging us to consume, because without it, the whole rotten system would collapse. And this means more and more dangerous emissions, and more and more waste.

Second, the competitive nature of the capitalist system means that enterprises – and nations – must invest more and more resources in profitable economic investments on the one hand, and the military machine on the other.

Just as we have seen with the coronavirus pandemic, public health and safety must therefore take a backseat as we hurtle from one catastrophe to the next.