‘How many dead will we accept?’ European floods expose failure to heed climate warnings

LIEGE, Belgium — Pierre Ozer has been expecting these floods for decades.

That’s how long climate scientists like him have been warning that devastating floods — like the ones that have killed more than 100 people, with many still unaccounted for in Germany and Belgium — would hit Europe more often as the world warms. 

“It’s a strange feeling,” said Ozer, one of Belgium’s leading climatologists from the University of Liège. “You talk about it for, like, a quarter of a century. And people say yeah, yeah. But nothing really happens … We just wait.”

The floods ripped through this part of Belgium and large parts of western Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on Thursday. 

On Friday, Ozer was chain-smoking on a park bench in Angleur — a low-lying riverbank district in his home city of Liège. Just 24 hours earlier the bench had been deep underwater; a few meters away, a car sat suspended on a concrete pillar.

“How many people dying are we going to accept?” Ozer said. “Is a tipping point not reached already?”

Ozer calculated in his head how often such a flood might have happened before humans heated the climate by more than a degree. The River Meuse was flowing through Liège at the fastest rate ever recorded. Rainfall records have been smashed across the region. And the floods were occurring in summer, which is unusual because the rivers aren’t swelled by melting snow. 

It’s “maybe once every 1,000 years,” he said. The question he said he cannot answer was how many times an event this extreme will recur between now and the end of the century, now that climate change is changing the way storms behave. It could be “like five or six times,” he said. “This is a brand new disaster” for the region.

Events this severe, over such a vast area of northwestern Europe, don’t just happen without warning. Scientists were tracking the storm as it headed southwards throughout this week, and the European Flood Awareness System issued alerts of life-threatening floods to national authorities early in the week. But people were either told to evacuate too late, or not at all. 

In Liège, acting mayor Christine Defraigne called for an evacuation after the streets of Angleur were already underwater. POLITICO spoke to five people as they worked to clear their streets, homes and businesses, all of whom said they had been taken by surprise by the storm.

“It came at such a speed — we didn’t see it coming,” said John, the owner of local barbershop Studio 87. He couldn’t reach his shop when the flood started; after a day of cleaning, the studio is still a mess. “We had to watch our store disappear from afar,” he said.

Ozer was helping his colleague Guénaël Devillet, who runs the geography department at the University of Liège, empty the ground floor of his home of water and flotsam. The buildings have a six-foot-high dark strip running along their walls, showing how high the flood reached. It picked up cars and tossed them down the street like bath toys — nearby a red SEAT has its back wheel embedded in the windscreen of a Citroën.

“We got stuck,” Devillet said. When the flood started, his family decided to save some of their belongings from the water, but within half an hour the water had risen further — and soon, it had come too high to leave by car, he said. “Here, it was truly a torrent,” he said, pointing at the street. “We couldn’t cross.”

They hadn’t been alerted to the floods, he said: “There were warnings to evacuate the city, but that was three hours after — over here, it was already done.” 

At least 18 people have died in Belgium, Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden said Friday. Because of good fortune, rather than good planning, no deaths have so far been reported in Angleur. Eleven-year-old Inaya was trapped alone with her sister for seven hours on Wednesday after their parents went out and then could not return to them because their street had turned into a river. The pair sheltered on the top floor while the water ran through downstairs. 

“I didn’t know if I was going to die,” she said.

Ozer advises governments around the world — particularly in West Africa but also in Belgium — on flood risk management. He described what he has seen in the past few days as what he would expect in a country with extremely limited communication networks, not one of the wealthiest, most hyperconnected parts of Europe.

The fact that people discovered the severity of the flood by watching it rise on their street is “crazy,” he said.

Ozer, who lives in a different part of Liège but whose basement was also flooded, said he had checked the local flood warning website on Tuesday night and was stunned to see that no warning had been issued. 

“Can you imagine that? Almost all the water of the summer falls in 36 hours,” he said, shaking his head. “You are a governor of a city or something like that. You check the website: Everything is under control.”

Liège narrowly escaped an even bigger catastrophe as the River Meuse reached a critical point near the city center before dropping overnight on Thursday. “For a few centimeters all the city of Liège would have been flooded,” said Ozer.

He said he would be conducting a full investigation to discover what had gone wrong in the Wallonia region, where Liège is one of the biggest cities. But he also said the inquiry should extend to regions in Germany where the death toll was even higher.

“If something went wrong in Wallonia, something went wrong in all the other regions as well,” he said. 

But instead of building to be ready for the next flood, Ozer said a local minister had told him on Friday that all of Wallonia’s money that had been set aside for improvements to adapt to climate change would now be spent on repairs.

“It’s a question of governance,” Ozer said, that a predicted catastrophe, both in the long and short-term sense, could catch Europe so apparently unaware. 

“We know the direction we take,” he said.

This article is part of POLITICO’s premium policy service: Pro Energy and Climate. From climate change, emissions targets, alternative fuels and more, our specialized journalists keep you on top of the topics driving the Energy and Climate policy agenda. Email [email protected] for a complimentary trial.