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European Flooding

Not your usual flood event.

The recent flooding will play a significant political role in the national elections in Germany that are coming up this fall. The debate will be about climate change. is it human caused,? How much effort should be put into countering a carbon based economy? And, who will be the best leader moving forward?

Lots to debate, meanwhile the clean-up continues and the search for the missing. In a flood event that also had considerable mud from landslides it is unlikely that any survivors will be found at this point and going forward.

The last numbers I read were 100 confirmed dead and up to 1,500 missing. Even if the missing drops dramatically, that is a huge number of dead for a flood event. You'd have to call it a flash flood type of disaster with little to no warning for people living next to rivers.

When on a Rhine River cruise a couple of years ago I noted that on the "old stone bridge" going into the City of Heidelberg over the River Neckar, there are markings carved into one of the columns, marking record flood events. They range from 1993 to 1817 in the picture I took. The bridge dates back to 1786-88. They built a stone bridge because the wooden ones kept getting washed away in high water events.

Historic flooding is a term that comes to mind with events like these.

Eric Holdeman is a nationally known emergency manager. He has worked in emergency management at the federal, state and local government levels. Today he serves as the Director, Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR), which is part of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER). The focus for his work there is engaging the public and private sectors to work collaboratively on issues of common interest, regionally and cross jurisdictionally.