A year after the flood disaster, previously unpublished helicopter footage has appeared, showing the drama in all its brutality. The Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of the Interior does not want to take these videos as an opportunity to see misconduct on the part of his crisis team.
The turbulence surrounding the Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Minister Roger Lewentz (SPD) does not stop. Since the recent dramatic videos from police helicopters of the Ahr flood on the evening of July 14, 2021, his defense line has been crumbling. The scenes of desperate people on the roofs in the midst of enormous amounts of water between the villages of Mayschoss and Schuld give rise to doubts that the situation center in the Ministry of the Interior (IM) and the landlord did not have a reliable picture of the situation by 10:45 p.m. at the latest, as Lewentz always asserts. It seems all the more incomprehensible that those responsible did not set up a crisis management team to take over the nationwide operations management.
Here you can see the video:
Actually, Lewentz should go. But Prime Minister Malu Dreyer is still holding on to her most important comrade. Just two days ago, the minister showed selected journalists three previously unpublished helicopter videos. Lewentz claims not to have seen the recordings on the evening of the tide. Only a few photos were shown to him. Not enough, according to the minister, to act. The statements of the pilots, who reported to his employees in the situation center about bad pictures from the flood areas, did not change that. Lewentz didn’t respond. The SPD state party leader backed up his inaction to the media present with a questionable chain of arguments: If he had seen the videos that evening, nothing would have changed. From his point of view, the recordings had still not documented a reliable picture of the situation.
That’s just plain wrong. Since 6 p.m. on July 14, numerous alarm reports have been received from the flood regions. There was, for example, the head of the State Office for the Environment, which is responsible for flood forecasts, who warned of a catastrophe in an email early in the evening. Shortly after 10 p.m., a police officer in Koblenz alerted the IM situation center. It was probably their tips that prompted an employee from the IM situation center in Mainz to send some helicopters to the crisis regions on the Ahr to get an idea of the situation. But the videos never arrived in Mainz, and nobody asked about them. As a result, no nationwide alarm went out on the night that most people died in the lower Ahr. Nobody took responsibility. Interior Minister Lewentz tried in vain to reach the Prime Minister shortly before 1 a.m. In a text message he informed her that the situation was escalating. Then he went to bed too. The blind flight did not end until the next morning. The first reports of deaths and injuries suggested that Rhineland-Palatinate had been hit by the worst flood disaster in post-war history.
It is now becoming apparent that the state government failed completely in crisis management on that night of flooding: the result is that nothing was heard, not noticed and therefore nothing was done.
Badly hit politically, the Dreyer cabinet is clutching at every straw. Then Frank Hachemer, President of the State Fire Association (Lfv), has to help the Interior Minister with a completely crude thesis. Tenor: The one-sided preoccupation with the video recordings obscures the complex situation on the night of the flood. A mass evacuation from the narrow Ahr valley would certainly have claimed even more lives. Hachemer estimates the number at 1,000. Even from his own fire brigade ranks, the “expert” reaped severe criticism of his defense speech for the ailing Minister of the Interior. It is fitting that Lewentz presented him with the silver honorary fire brigade medal only two weeks ago. You know and appreciate each other.
No question, such favoritism votes are so embarrassing that one has to ask oneself whether the Mainz rulers still feel a spark of honor in the face of more than 130 flood victims. It’s time to take responsibility. Interior Minister Lewentz should confess his failure on the flood night and resign. This is the only way that the confidence of many Rhineland-Palatinate residents in their state government can grow again.
