Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler (dpa / lrs) – The number of people who died in the flood disaster in the Ahr valley has risen to 141. 115 dead have been identified, said Florian Stadtfeld from the Koblenz police headquarters on Wednesday in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler. 17 people are still missing. On Tuesday the death toll was 139.
Extreme heavy rain had triggered a tidal wave on the Ahr in the north of Rhineland-Palatinate on July 14th and 15th and flooded large parts of the valley. Around 42,000 people are affected by the consequences of the flood.
According to an open letter from the Altenahr community to the federal and state government, there should be closer exchange with the communities in the disaster area. To this end, Chancellery Minister Helge Braun and the head of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Chancellery, Fabian Kirsch, want to meet with district administrators and mayors on Wednesday next week, according to a government spokeswoman in Berlin.
Many of the demands of the open letter of July 31 have already been implemented or are on the way, replied the Mainz State Chancellor Kirsch. In a statement also available to the SWR it was said: “The federal government has promised aid, the state decided on emergency aid and set up a donation account, the first payments are in progress.” A reconstruction team is coordinating the work in the Ministry of the Interior in Mainz. Financial security through a “national reconstruction fund” will then be on the agenda of the prime ministers on August 10th.
The public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz has so far received 25 reports of the flood disaster on a specially set up e-mail address. These are “for the most part very valuable”, as a spokesman for the public prosecutor announced. The public prosecutor is currently examining whether, after the flood disaster, they will initiate an investigation into the initial suspicion of negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm. It will only be determined if the result of the test affirms the initial suspicion. There may be late warnings and evacuations in the room.
The flood disaster caused damage of around 220 million euros in agriculture in Rhineland-Palatinate. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture in Berlin called these estimates of the federal states on Wednesday. Because of the severe destruction in wine-growing businesses, the extent in Rhineland-Palatinate is far greater than in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the damage in agriculture has so far been estimated at 52 million euros.
In the wine-growing businesses on the Ahr alone, damage of 110 million euros was caused, and at the winegrowers’ cooperatives on the Ahr it is around 50 million euros. The losses in viticulture range from buildings and technology to extensive stocks of wine from previous vintages.
In Mainz, restorers began cleaning up archaeological objects from the flooded depot of the Ahrweiler City Museum. A total of several hundred items from the collection arrived at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM), which as a Leibniz Research Institute for Archeology has many years of experience in restoration. The main task is to document, clean and dry the objects, said RGZM coordinator Christiane Nowak-Lipps on Wednesday. Then it is a matter of preparing the pieces for temporary storage.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210804-99-707955 / 3
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