The flooding followed record rainfall in parts of western Europe that caused rivers to burst their banks. Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist who set up and now advises the European Flood Awareness System – an EU programme designed to provide early warnings of dangerous floods – said alerts were sent to authorities in Europe over the weekend.
“There were alerts going out… saying there’s some very serious rain and floods coming: be aware. It’s then for the national authorities to take that information and go with it,” she said.
Prof Cloke said there were places where the system had “done what it’s designed to do”, with early warnings heeded. But there were “also places where those warnings did not get through to the people and they did not know it was going to happen”.
Prof Cloke set up the warning system after deadly flooding in Europe in 2002, hoping to prevent such an event from happening again. We should not be seeing this number of deaths from floods in 2021. It’s just unacceptable. There’s something going wrong with the system.
Structures in place for flood forecasting and warning differ across European countries. Prof Cloke says Germany has a “fragmented” system involving many different authorities in different states, resulting in varying responses.
A spokesman for the German weather service Deutscher Wetterdienst said it had issued a number of warnings about extreme rainfall. He said it was up to other authorities to determine the flood risk and act on evacuating people, or taking other measures.
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Source: BBC
