Bavaria severely affected

Floods: navigation on the Danube closed

Flooding in Emmersdorf on the Danube in Lower Austria

(Bild: SOPHIA KILLINGER)

Due to the flood situation in Austria, the entire course of the Danube has been closed to shipping. Only the Vienna Danube Canal remains open. In Germany, the situation remains critical due to flooding. A total of five people have died there so far.

Parts of southern Germany are still under water, with areas along the Danube in Bavaria now particularly badly affected. Several districts and the cities of Passau and Regensburg have declared a state of emergency.

Woman slid into the water with her car
In the Allgäu region, a woman died when her car slid into the water. The 57-year-old is the fifth known fatality. Several people were still missing on Tuesday. There should be hardly any more rain: "From a meteorological point of view, the all-clear can now be given for southern Germany," explained DWD meteorologist Robert Hausen. Isolated showers and thunderstorms are possible in the flood areas, but these will not be severe.

The peaks, i.e. the highest water levels of the flood, were expected at several gauges along the Danube on Tuesday. According to the flood information service, the water levels should remain below previous values. Between Kelheim and Passau, however, the water levels are expected to be above the highest reporting level 4 up to and including Wednesday.

Old town of Passau flooded
In Passau, where the three rivers Danube, Inn and Ilz converge, the riverbank area with the first row of houses in the old town is flooded. The city is repeatedly hit particularly hard by flooding. Regensburg, upstream on the Danube, is similarly affected. There are still "one or two days of real tension, real worry" ahead, as Mayor Gertrud Maltz-Schwarzfischer (SPD) said. Although the water level is lower than in previous floods, the water is flowing away more slowly. On Monday evening, the houses on a street along the Danube had been evacuated because the ground had softened and the protective walls were threatening to slide down.

The center of Passau was flooded.

(Bild: APA/AFP/Michaela STACHE)

Woman held out in a treetop
By contrast, there was a happy turnaround at midday in the case of a missing 32-year-old woman in Swabia: She was discovered and rescued by a search drone. She had taken refuge in a treetop in the flooded forest near Neu-Ulm on Sunday night and held out around two meters above the water, as the police reported. When the emergency services finally found her two and a half days later, the floodwater was still about chest-high under the tree.

According to preliminary data, several places in southern Germany had received more rainfall in the past few days than only every 50 to 100 years. Meteorologist Thomas Deutschländer from the DWD said that one could speak of precipitation of the century. "That's special, but not completely exceptional." Around 20 to 30 measuring stations indicated such particularly high values - mainly from a region north-east of Augsburg almost as far as Lake Constance. Some extreme values related to precipitation on one day, others to precipitation over three consecutive days.

"Far from normality"
In Baden-Württemberg, the flood situation is already easing. Clean-up operations are underway there. "But we are still a long way from normality," said a city spokeswoman in the affected municipality of Ebersbach an der Fils. In many places, residents were working together with emergency services and volunteers to remove the worst of the dirt from the streets, pump out more cellars and remove garbage that had washed up.

Thousands of helpers are still fighting the floods. They often fought against the masses of water until they were completely exhausted and risked their lives to save people from flooded houses, said Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin and thanked them. He also thanked the many citizens "who helped spontaneously and lent a hand where the disaster was at its worst, filling sandbags, caring for evacuees or offering comfort".