EVIA, Greece — Amid twisted cages and scorched trees, Harilaos Tertipis stepped out of his ruined stables dragging the charred corpses of his sheep — burned, like so much else, in the wildfires that have raged across Greece.
As the survivors of his flock huddled together on a roadside hill below, the bells on their necks clanging and their legs singed, he said that if he had stayed with his animals instead of rushing home to protect his family and house, “I wouldn’t be here now.”
scientists have now concluded is irreversible.
before we reach irreversible tipping points.”
But a string of disasters this summer has left many to wonder whether that tipping point is already here, driving home the realization that climate change is no longer a distant threat for future generations, but an immediate scourge affecting rich and poor nations alike.
Turkey and Algeria, virtually no corner of Europe has been untouched by a bewildering array of calamities, whether fire, flood or heat.
Sweltering temperatures have set off wildfires in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Formerly once-in-a-millennium flooding in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands killed at least 196 people. Places in Italy hit more than 118 degrees this week, while parts of the country were variously scorched by fire, battered by hailstorms or inundated by floods.
“It’s not just Greece,” said Vasilis Vathrakoyiannis, a spokesman for the Greek fire service. “It’s the whole European ecosystem.”
But the shifting epicenter of natural disaster has now fallen on Evia, a densely wooded island northeast of Athens, once best known for its beekeepers and resin producers, its olive groves and seaside resorts, and now a capital of the consequences of a warming planet.
This week, as firefighters scrambled to put out rekindling fires and helicopters dropped seawater to sate licking flames, acres of burned hillsides and fields lay under white ash, as if dusted with snow.
I drove through winding roads riddled with fallen trees and electric wires. Smoke hung low, like a thick fog. The trunks of mangled trees still smoldered and the hive boxes of beekeepers looked like burned end tables abandoned in empty fields. Miles away from the fires, the smoke still left an acrid taste in my mouth. Ash drifted around cafes where waitresses constantly watered down tables and the sun imbued the dense haze with a sickly orange hue.
“We lived in paradise,” said Babis Apostolou, 59, tears in his eyes as he looked over the charred land surrounding his village, Vasilika, on the northern tip of Evia. “Now it’s hell.”
This week, the fires covered new ground. In the southern Peloponnese, where wildfires killed more than 60 people in 2007, a long stretch of fire tore through forest and houses, prompting the evacuation of more than 20 more villages. But many Greeks have refused to leave their homes.
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When the police told Argyro Kypraiou, 59, in the Evia village of Kyrinthos to evacuate on Saturday, she stayed. As the trees across the street blazed, she fought the airborne barrage of burning pine cones and flames with a garden hose. When the water ran out she beat back the fire with branches.
“If we had left, the houses would have burned,” she said across from the still smoldering ravine. A truck rolled by and the driver leaned out the window, shouting to her that there was another fire in the field behind her house. “We keep putting out fires,” she shouted back. “We don’t have any other job.”
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister of Greece, has called the recent days “among the hardest for our country in decades” and promised to compensate the afflicted and reforest the land. Residents across the seared north of Evia complained that the government had failed to fly water-dropping aircraft out to them fast enough or that it had waited too long to ask the European Union for help.
Greece’s top prosecutor has ordered up an investigation into whether criminal activity could possibly have sparked the fires, perhaps to clear land for development. Many here blamed mysterious arsonists for starting the fire.
“This is arson,” said Mr. Apostolou. “I had heard they want to put in wind turbines.”
Mr. Tertipis said, “I hope the person who set these fires will suffer as much as my animals.”
But it was also possible that the finger-pointing at arsonists stemmed from a feeling of powerlessness and the need to blame someone — anyone — for a crisis that at least some acknowledged was everyone’s fault.
“We all have to make changes,” said Irini Anastasiou, 28, who expected the fires to keep happening around the world as the planet warmed. She looked out from the front desk of her now empty hotel in Pefki, one of the hardest-hit towns, and saw an opaque wall of haze over the sea.
“Usually, you see clear across to the mountains,” she said. “Now you can see nothing.”
The residents of Evia did what they could. In the town of Prokopi, volunteer firefighters set up base in the Forest Museum (“focused on man and his relationship to the forest”).
Hundreds of boxes packed with supplies for the displaced cluttered the log cabin. They brimmed with crackers and cereals and granola bars. Soft stacks of children-and-adult diapers reached up to the windows. Boxes held medicines and burn creams, aloe vera, Flamigel, hydrogel and Flogo Instant Calm Spray, under a sign promoting TWIG, the Transnational Woodland Industries Group.
An international group of emergency workers operated out of the cabin. Some of the 108 firefighters sent by Romania coordinated with Greek Army officials and local authorities to put out the flames. Some volunteers went out with chain saws to cut down trees while those returning leaned against a wall of bottled water and ruminated on what had gone wrong.
Ioannis Kanellopoulos, 62, blamed heavy snowfall during the winter for breaking so many branches and creating so much kindling on the forest floor. But the intense heat did not help.
“When the fire broke out it was 113 degrees in the shade,” he said.
He said the previous benchmark for destruction in the area was a 1977 blaze. This fire had far eclipsed it, he said, and guaranteed that it would not be surpassed for years.
“There’s nothing left to burn,” he said.
“It’s not California,” added his friend Spiros Michail, 52.
That there was nothing left to burn was the island’s common refrain. The punchline to the terrible joke nature had played on them.
But it wasn’t true. There was plenty more to burn.
At night the fires came back, appearing on the dark hillsides in the distance like Chinese lanterns. The fires burned on the sides of the roads like ghostly campsites.
Stylianos Totos, a forest ranger, stood rod straight as he looked through binoculars at a hillside near Ellinika.
“How do we get access to that one,” he called to his colleague in a truck carrying more than a ton of water. He worried that the wind would change direction from east to west and feed the fire with fresh pines. Just before 9 p.m. Tuesday, one of the small flames flared up, lighting all the barren land and twisted branches around it. “Andrea,” he shouted. “Call it in.”
But any help, and any change in global behavior, had come too late for Mr. Tertipis and his flock.
Mr. Tertipis, 60, who lost his mother and suffered permanent scarring on his left arm in 1977’s fire, rushed back from home to his stables before dawn on Sunday. The fire had consumed half his flock, but left a plush green pine tree and verdant field untouched only a few dozen yards away.
“That’s how it is, in five minutes, you live or die,” he said, adding, “the fire just changes all the time.”
For two days he could not answer the phone or do much of anything other than weep. Then he started cleaning up, wading through the remains in galoshes, dragging load after load away, using a sled he fashioned from a hook and a broken refrigerator door.
He had been raising animals all his life, and he said he had no choice but to keep going, no matter how inhospitable the weather around him had become.
“Things may have changed,” he said with a shrug. “What are you going to do? Just give up?”
ATHENS — Firefighters continued to battle blazes across Greece on Saturday after another difficult night that saw thousands more people fleeing their homes and hundreds being evacuated by sea, as southern Europe grapples with one of its worst heat waves in decades.
Wildfires are also still raging in Turkey, which is in its 11th day of trying to extinguish flames that are ravaging its southern coastline and that have killed at least eight people and destroyed hundreds of acres of land.
High winds in Greece hampered nighttime firefighting efforts on Friday as wildfires tore through swaths of forestland north of Athens, the capital, and through mountains and farmland on the island of Evia and on the southern Peloponnese peninsula.
As flames ravaged Evia’s coastline, hundreds of residents and tourists were evacuated by ferry, dramatic scenes of which were captured on video by the National Observatory of Athens’s online weather service, Meteo.
North of the capital, police officers went door to door to urge people to abandon their homes, and they evacuated a detention facility for migrants, a day after moving asylum seekers out of another camp in the area.
At first light on Saturday, firefighters and aircraft from several countries — including Croatia, Cyprus, France, Israel, Sweden and Ukraine — joined their Greek counterparts in battling blazes dotting the mainland and islands. Romania and Switzerland were also sending help, followed by the Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany and Spain.
Fifty-five fires were active around the country, the largest of which were north of Athens, on the island of Evia and in Fokida, in central Greece, according to Nikos Hardalias, the deputy civil protection minister, speaking at a briefing early Saturday afternoon. He added that the situation had improved slightly since Friday, but that fires were constantly rekindling as winds strengthened.
Dozens of firefighting aircraft and thousands of firefighters have been working to control the wildfires, but overnight, TV reports said, flames moved north, reaching a new town and forcing six neighborhoods to evacuate.
Earlier Saturday in Greece, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said his government’s priority was protecting human lives, and then, as possible, people’s properties.
A 38-year-old volunteer firefighter from Ippokrateios Politeia, a settlement north of Athens affected by the fires, died on Thursday of head injuries after being hit by a falling electricity pylon.
More than 20 people have suffered burns, including four firefighters, two of whom were critically injured. President Katerina Sakellaropoulou visited those firefighters on Saturday at a hospital in Athens.
The fires have razed tens of thousands of acres of forestland, but the number of homes that have been destroyed remains unclear.
Officials have said that at least three people have been arrested and are facing arson charges in connection with blazes in Kryoneri, north of Athens; in Fthiotida, in central Greece; and in Kalamata, in southern Greece.
ATHENS — Shells of houses and cars left gutted by flames. Stretches of forest reduced to ash. Tourists evacuated by boat from once idyllic beaches where the skies are thick with smoke. As southern Europe grapples with one of its worst heat waves in decades, deadly forest fires have engulfed stretches of the region, bringing a newly reopened tourism industry to a halt and forcing mass evacuations.
The raging fires pushed residents from their homes in villages on the Greek mainland and islands and across neighboring Turkey, and forced tourists to abandon beachside destinations across the region.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the government’s handling of the deadly disaster, with opponents denouncing the lack of aerial support for the firefighting efforts.
Hundreds of square miles of forest burned as more than 180 fires blazed across the country. At least eight people died, hundreds were injured and dozens lost their homes.
in a video posted on Twitter. “My forest is in flames right now.”
Firefighters were able to control a fire approaching a power plant in Milas after working through the night to save the facility. Trees on the grounds of the power plant were burned, but the main site was not seriously damaged, officials said.
Greece battled multiple large fires across the country that killed scores of people.
While scientists have not yet had time to evaluate the connection between the current wave of extreme temperatures and global warming, it fits an overall trend that has seen climate change play a role in extreme weather in Europe. Research has shown that in major heat waves across Europe in recent summers, climate change has been a significant worsening factor.
Efthymis Lekkas, a professor of natural disaster management at the University of Athens, warned of “an enduring nightmare in August,” and urged the authorities to be ready for potential flooding after the destruction of large stretches of forest.
Greece’s General Secretariat for Civil Protection warned of an “extreme” risk of fires on Friday, as intense winds are forecast to worsen the situation.
Niki Kitsantonis reported from Athens and Megan Specia reported from New York.
an ambitious proposal to cut carbon emissions, how will those who hope to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel respond?
If only because of their sheer scale, analysts say, the floods are likely to play a significant role for voters when they go to the polls on Sept 26 to replace Ms. Merkel, who has led the country for 16 years.
The death toll in Germany climbed to at least 143 on Saturday, while the toll across the border in Belgium stood at 27, its national crisis center said. The count rose most sharply in Germany’s Ahrweiler district in Rhineland-Palatinate State, where the police said that more than 90 people had died. The authorities feared that number could yet grow.
In Germany, Europe’s largest economy and a country that prides itself on its sense of stability, the chaos wrought by nature was likely to reverberate for months, if not years.
But on Saturday, residents and rescue workers in flood-hit areas faced the more immediate and daunting task of clearing piles of debris, unclogging roads and salvaging some of the homes that had survived the deluge.
Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for, but officials have struggled to offer precise numbers.
Electricity and telephone services remain inaccessible in parts of Germany, and some roads are still impassable. That lack of access may account for the high tallies of those still considered missing. And some of those who are not accounted for could simply be away, on vacation or work assignment. In Belgium, police officers started knocking on doors to try to confirm the whereabouts of residents.
Still, officials said they expected to find additional victims.
Extreme downpours like the ones that hit Germany are one of the most visible signs that the climate is changing as a result of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have shown a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, generating more rainfall.
Floods of this size have not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years, according to meteorologists and German officials.
Rhineland-Palatinate was one of the two hardest-hit German states in the west, along with North Rhine-Westphalia. The Rhine River flows through the two regions, and the rain fell so rapidly that it engorged even small streams and tributaries not typically considered flood threats.
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Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, traveled on Saturday to the town of Erftstadt, southwest of Cologne, where the flooding destroyed homes. Ms. Merkel planned to travel on Sunday to Schuld in Rhineland-Palatinate, which was badly hit, even as all of its 700 residents managed to survive.
There were scenes of devastation from all around Western Europe, the floods having caused damage from Switzerland to the Netherlands. But Germany was hardest hit.
Days before roiling waters tore through western Germany, a European weather agency had issued an extreme flood warning, as models showed that storms would send rivers surging to levels that had not been seen in hundreds of years.
The warnings, however, did little good.
Though Germany’s flood warning system, a network of sensors that measure river levels, functioned as it was supposed to, state and local officials said the amount of rain was unlike anything they had ever seen, causing even small streams and rivers to flood their banks.
Survivors and officials said many areas were caught unprepared as normally placid brooks and streams turned into torrents that swept away cars, houses and bridges. About 15,000 police officers, soldiers and emergency service workers have been deployed in Germany to help with the search and rescue.
Dr. Linda Speight, a hydrometeorologist at the University of Reading in Britain who studies how flooding occurs, blamed poor communication about the high risk posed by the flooding as contributing to the significant loss of life. “There should not have been so many deaths from this event,” she said.
Residents cleaned up mud and debris in Bad Münstereifel’s town center on Saturday.Credit…Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Residents returning home, only to find their homes no longer there. Roads submerged by landslides. Loved ones still unaccounted for.
As the weather improved on Saturday and rescue workers searched for missing residents, many people in flood-hit areas of Germany were trying to re-establish some order amid the chaos and destruction.
Friends and relatives mobilized to help, maneuvering around blocked roads and washed-out bridges. Crushed cars and mounds of ruined goods were carted away, or piled by the side of muddied, cracked roads.
Many expressed amazement at how so much could have been destroyed so quickly. For Lisa Knopp, 19, who was helping to empty the flood-ruined basement of her grandmother’s home in Sinzig, a small town between the Rhine and Ahr rivers, the scenes of destruction “will stay with me a long time.”
Kim Falkenstein said her mother lost her home in Ahrweiler, one of the hardest-hit spots. Ms. Falkenstein, who was born in Ahrweiler and now lives in New York, said several friends had also lost their homes, and a classmate had died.
“I am heartbroken,” she said.
“Seeing my city being destroyed, people who I am close with losing their existence, and knowing I will never return to something I once called home,” Ms. Falkenstein said, “gives me goose bumps.”
In a country that is among Europe’s most prosperous, where orderliness is highly prized, many Germans were unnerved by the helplessness wrought by nature.
Bertrand Adams, a local official in Trier-Ehrang, a town in western Germany, stared in disbelief at the swirling waters only now receding from his community.
“It is beyond anything that could ever be imagined,” he told ZDF television. “We have a very good flood protection system that we developed only five years ago. We were so certain that nothing can go wrong.”
Daniela Schmitz, who has a ranch in Erftstadt, a town southwest of Cologne, was relieved that her property was not destroyed by the floods and that her horses had been evacuated. Others, she said, weren’t that fortunate.
“We were warned early enough — other stables are not doing so well,” she wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Many animals have drowned, entire stalls destroyed, and feed is becoming scarce. The conditions are really catastrophic in many places.”
On Saturday, German television channels carried wall-to-wall coverage of the flooding, as rescue workers continued searching for those who had been trapped by rising waters, with 143 confirmed dead in Germany and hundreds still missing.
As the official response picked up speed on Saturday, electricity, water and internet coverage were slowly being restored. Hundreds of police, fire and emergency vehicles crammed the roads into the most afflicted areas of Rhine-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia.
“For a long time, chatting about the weather was synonymous with triviality. That’s over now,” Germany’s ARD public television said in its lead editorial on Friday. “The weather is highly political; there is hardly any nonpolitical weather anymore, especially not during an election campaign.”
The shift in the debate comes as the European Union has announced an ambitious blueprint to make the 27-country bloc carbon-neutral by 2050. No European country may be affected more than Germany, the continent’s largest economy.
Armin Laschet, 60, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is looking to succeed Ms. Merkel in the Sept. 26 election, has lauded his regional government for passing legislation on climate change. But critics point to the open-pit soft coal mines operating in his state and his repeated emphasis on the importance of Germany remaining an industrial powerhouse.
Pressed in a television interview on whether the floods would prompt him to alter his climate policy, Mr. Laschet snapped at the moderator.
“I am a governor, not an activist,” he said. “Just because we have had a day like this does not mean we change our politics.”
Yet floods have a history of influencing political campaigns in Germany. In 2002, pictures of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder wading in rubber boots through streets awash in the muddy waters of the swollen Elbe, while his conservative rival remained on vacation, are credited with helping him win the election that year.
Perhaps wary of that lesson, Annalena Baerbock, the Greens party candidate for chancellor and Mr. Laschet’s strongest rival, cut short her vacation to visit stricken areas in Rhineland-Palatinate on Friday.
She called for immediate assistance for those affected, but also issued an appeal to better protect “residential areas and infrastructure” from extreme weather events, which she linked to the changing climate.
Whether the flooding will be enough to lift the party remains to be seen. After the Greens enjoyed an initial surge of excitement — Ms. Baerbock is the only woman running to replace the country’s first female chancellor — support for the party has dipped to around 20 percent in polls.
That puts the Greens in second place behind Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, who have been climbing to around 30 percent support, the latest surveys show.
Olaf Scholz, 63, Ms. Merkel’s finance minister who is also running for the chance to replace her and return his Social Democratic Party to the chancellery, headed on Friday to flooded regions in Rhineland-Palatinate, where he pledged swift help from the government and linked the disaster to climate change.
“I am firmly convinced that our task is stopping human-made climate change,” Mr. Scholz told ZDF public television.
The Lebenshilfe Haus, where 12 people died.Credit…Thomas Frey/DPA, via Associated Press
They were disabled residents of a care home, the Lebenshilfe Haus, asleep when the waters of the flash flood suddenly rose early Thursday morning. Trapped on the first floor, they drowned before aid could arrive.
As calamitous floods hit Germany, the deaths of 12 people at a care home in Sinzig, a small town between the Rhine and Ahr rivers, have broken hearts all over the country and demonstrated how tragedy could have been avoided had flood warnings been better heeded.
“Every person who dies is a tragedy,” said Tabera Irrle, 23, a train driver who came to Sinzig to help with the cleanup. “But this is a special sadness.”
Neighbors could hear screaming, they said later, but all that emergency workers could do was save the other 24 residents on higher floors some three hours later, bringing them out the windows in small boats. The disabled residents had been under the care of a lone watchman.
Dominik Gasper, 17, was helping his parents and uncle clean out the mud and ruined belongings of his grandparents’ house near the care home. He knew about the 12 dead, he said.
“It was so horrible,” he said. “You can’t really understand such a thing.”
The waters crested in Sinzig at more than 7 meters, about 23 feet, the highest in a century, said Andreas Geron, the mayor. He said emergency workers in fire trucks had tried to warn residents late Wednesday night, but few said they had heard an alarm.
Two other Sinzig residents died in this town of 20,000, and a newly renovated bridge over the Ahr collapsed.
Luis Rufino, 50, a lifelong resident of Sinzig, was angry about what happened. He said some of it could have been prevented.
“Our health system is better than in the U.S., but they are still trying to avoid costs,” he said. “So there was only one guy watching over these poor people, and when the lights went out, they went into a panic, and when the flood came through, they had no chance.”
Ulrich van Bebber, the chairman of Lebenshilfe, which has operated the care home since it was built 27 years ago, told journalists that “we are all horrified, stunned and infinitely sad.”
He said those who survived were being cared for. “We want to keep the Lebenshilfe Haus as a residential facility and, if necessary, rebuild it.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on a visit to Washington this week.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Usually a national leader faced with floods as severe as those in Germany would be expected to break off whatever she was doing and rush to the crisis area.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany completed an official visit to Washington that ended Friday, and she was not expected to visit the flood zone until Sunday, long after most other German political leaders had come and gone. (Saturday was also her 67th birthday.)
Ms. Merkel did express from Washington her sympathy to the victims, saying during an appearance with President Biden on Thursday: “My heart goes out to all of those who, in this catastrophe, lost their loved ones or who are still worrying about the fate of people still missing.”
And hours after touching down in Germany on Friday morning, Ms. Merkel took part in a crisis meeting with leaders of the state of Rhineland Palatinate, where many of the hardest-hit communities are. She also spoke by telephone with Armin Laschet, the leader of North Rhine Westphalia, which also suffered major devastation and loss of life.
Mr. Laschet — who, like Ms. Merkel, is a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party — is the party’s candidate to succeed her after the country holds elections in September.
So far Ms. Merkel has not faced major criticism for taking several days to see the damage for herself. She has never been one for political theater, and does not need to worry about opinion polls because she is stepping down from politics after the elections.
Germans also seemed to understand the importance of her trip to Washington — probably her last as chancellor — and meetings with Mr. Biden.
Germany is anxious to repair its relationship with the United States, a crucial ally and trading partner, after four tense years of dealing with President Donald J. Trump, who treated Germany like a rival and threatened to impose punitive tariffs on German cars. At a news conference with Mr. Biden on Thursday, Ms. Merkel seemed almost buoyant to be dealing with a new administration.
“We’re not only partners and allies, but we’re very close friends,” she said of Mr. Biden.
Addressing an underlying cause of Western Europe’s worst floods in centuries, the two leaders signed a pact to take “urgent action to address the climate crisis.”
“There is a dramatic increase in such unusual weather phenomena, and we have to contend with this,” Ms. Merkel said while standing alongside Mr. Biden.
Huge cleanup efforts were underway after days of flooding inundated parts of Western Europe this week.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, left, and Armin Laschet, governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, speaking with rescue workers in Erftstadt.Credit…Marius Becker/EPA, via Shutterstock
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany on Saturday visited the city of Erftstadt, where floods had ripped away homes, setting off a landslide that wrought further destruction.
An entire stretch of highway remained submerged there on Saturday as fears mounted that people who had tried to flee this week’s torrential rains could have been trapped in their cars by flash flooding — and may still be found when the waters recede.
Already, at least 43 people are known to have died.
Mr. Steinmeier, who is seeking a second term in office after his current one ends in February, urged Germans to help in any way they could.
“Many people in this region have nothing left but hope,” Mr. Steinmeier said. “And we cannot disappoint these hopes.”
A president’s role in Germany is largely ceremonial, but in times of national tragedy or crisis, the head of state often helps set the tone and serve as a representative of the people.
Mr. Steinmeier was joined by Armin Laschet, governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to Erftstadt, and the leading candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel when Germans vote for a new government in the fall.
Ms. Merkel planned to travel on Sunday to the town of Schuld (not Stuhr as an earlier version of this item said) in Rhineland-Palatinate.
The main road in the city center of Bad Münstereifel, in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany, on Saturday.Credit…Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have highlighted two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it.
Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as rivers burst through banks in Germany and Belgium, leaving people shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Days before in the Northwestern United States, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for another heat wave.
The events have ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples’ lives.”
Disasters magnified by global warming have left a trail of death and loss across much of the developing world, wiping out crops in Bangladesh, leveling villages in Honduras and threatening the very existence of small island nations.
A big question is whether the disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases.
“This tragic event is a reminder that, in the climate emergency, no one is safe,” Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, said in a statement about the flooding.
Part of the historic center of Prague was underwater in August 2002.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The floods devastating Europe have killed scores of people, leaving at least 1,300 missing, uprooting families, causing immense financial damage and reducing homes and cars to the state of floating bath toys. But it is not the first time the continent has been buffeted by a deluge.
Here are some of the other major lethal floods and flooding caused by storms in recent years.
February and May 2014
A house damaged by flooding in Krupanj, Serbia, in 2014.Credit…Dragan Karadarevic/European Pressphoto Agency
A 7-year-old boy dead after falling ill in a flooded home in Surrey. A kayaker drowned on a swollen Welsh river. A coastal railroad ripped up by waves in Cornwall.
In a matter of months in 2014, at least 5,000 houses in Britain were damaged in what was then seen as one of the rainiest seasons in nearly 250 years. While some blamed the flooding on the austerity measures of David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, others pointed to climate change.
In May of that year, the heaviest rains and floods in 120 years hit Bosnia and Serbia, killing at least 33 people, forcing thousands out of their homes, and cutting off power in 100,000 households in Serbia, as several months’ worth of rainfall fell in a matter of days.
June 2013
A house near Deggendorf, Germany, surrounded by floodwaters in June 2013.Credit…Armin Weigel/European Pressphoto Agency
Germany is no stranger to flooding.
In Bitterfeld, in eastern Germany, about 10,000 people were asked to leave their homes in June 2013 after a levee on the Mulde River burst, amid some of the worst flooding that some German regions had seen in centuries. More than 600 residents of Dresden were brought to safety as electricity and water services to the city’s affected center were cut off.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, now tested by the current flooding, showed her mettle at the time, touring three of the hardest-hit areas to wade through ankle-deep floodwaters and visit victims of the flood.
January 2007
Storm-driven waves batter the port of Wimereux in northern France in 2007.Credit…Philippe Huguen/Agence France-Presse
The storm was called Kyrill by German meteorologists, and it spurred unrelenting rain in Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The howling gale churned through the British Isles and Northern Europe, uprooting trees, shattering windows, flooding beaches and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights at airports from London to Frankfurt.
According to the European Environment Agency, Kyrill killed 46 people and resulted in overall losses worth 8 billion euros. At the time, it was one of the most damaging extreme weather episodes ever recorded in Europe.
The name Kyrill stemmed from a German practice of naming weather systems. Anyone may name one, for a fee, and three siblings had paid to name the system as a 65th birthday gift for their father, not realizing it would grow into a fierce storm.
August 2005
A woman emptying a bucket into the flooded Aare River in Thun, Switzerland, in 2005.Credit…Peter Schneider/Keystone, via Associated Press
Such was the deluge in Central and Southern Europe in 2005 that in the Alps, military helicopters were deployed to ferry in supplies, evacuate stranded tourists and even stranded cows in mountain pastures threatened by rising water.
The floods left dozens dead. In Romania, which was badly affected by the flooding, victims were drowned as torrents of water rushed into their homes. Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Switzerland were also buffeted by the flooding.
The scenes of devastation were visceral and shocking. The Aare River broke through the windows of a children’s clothes shop in Bern, leaving baby strollers and toys floating in muddy water. Much of the historic old city of Lucerne remained underwater.
Meanwhile, in southern Poland, rivers broke their banks and at least seven bridges collapsed.
August 2002
Rescue workers in rafts searched for residents stranded by flooding in Prague in 2002.Credit…Sean Gallup/Getty Images
In 2002, some of the worst rains since 1890 pelted the Czech Republic, putting part of the historic center of Prague underwater and resulting in 50,000 residents being ordered to evacuate, as rivers swelled by near constant rain.
The death toll from the floods, which ravaged East and Central Europe, including Germany and Austria, and southern Russia, was more than 110. The flooding caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage.
The management of the crisis by Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, helped propel him to re-election.
In Austria, the Salzach River burst its banks south of Salzburg and threatened to inundate the city at the height of its famous summer festival, forcing the authorities to close most bridges and major roads.
Floodwaters rose in Hungary and Germany, and in northern Austria the authorities halted river traffic on parts of the Danube.
The Ahr river overran its banks in the village of Insul, Germany.Credit…Michael Probst/Associated Press
Was the flooding caused by climate change?
Tying a single weather event to climate change requires extensive attribution analysis, and that takes time, but scientists know one thing for sure: Warmer air holds more moisture, and that makes it more likely that any given storm will produce more precipitation.
For every 1 Celsius degree of warming, air can hold 7 percent more moisture.
On average, the world has warmed by a little more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century, when societies began pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“Any storm that comes along now has more moisture to work with,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “That’s the straightforward connection to the increased frequency of heavy downpours.”
And although it is still a subject of debate, some scientists say climate change might be causing storms to linger longer.
Some studies suggest that rapid warming in the Arctic is affecting the jet stream. One consequence of that, said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University in England, is that the river of wind is weakening and slowing down at certain times during the year, including summer. That, in turn, affects weather systems farther south.
“That means the storms have to move more slowly,” Dr. Fowler said. The storm that caused the flooding was practically stationary, she noted.
The combination of more moisture and a stalled storm system means that a lot of rain can fall over a given area.
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, one of the primary scientists with World Weather Attribution, a group that quickly analyzes extreme weather events to see whether they were made more likely by climate change, said the group was discussing whether to study the German floods.
Beyond the speed of a weather system and its moisture content, there are many factors that affect flooding that can make an analysis difficult. Local topography has to be taken into account, as that can affect how much runoff gets into which rivers.
Human impacts can complicate the analysis even further. Development near rivers can make runoff worse by reducing the amount of open land that can absorb rain. And infrastructure built to cope with heavy runoff and rising rivers may be under-designed and inadequate.
Watching the high water in Roermond, the Netherlands, on Friday.Credit…Vincent Jannink/EPA, via Shutterstock
While some development in cities and elsewhere can make flooding worse, other projects can reduce flooding. That appears to have been the case in the Netherlands, which was not as severely affected as neighboring Germany by this week’s storm.
After several major floods on the Meuse River in the 1990s, the Dutch government began a program called Room for the River to reduce flooding, said Nathalie Asselman, who advises the government and other clients on flood risk.
The work involved lowering and widening river beds, lowering flood plains and excavating side channels.
“The aim of these measures is to lower flood levels,” she said.
Taming water in the Netherlands, a waterlogged country, has been a matter of survival for centuries, and the imperative to keep levels under control is inextricably bound up with Dutch identity. Much of the country sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Climate change has also exacerbated the twin threats of storms and rising tides.
While a dike near the Meuse in southern Netherlands suffered a breach that caused some flooding until it was repaired on Friday, the measures appear to have worked.
The breach, in the dike along the Juliana Canal in the southern Netherlands, was closed by the Dutch military by dumping hundreds of sandbags into the growing hole. Hours before, thousands had been told to evacuate after the dike was breached along the canal, a 22-mile waterway that regulates the Meuse River.
The river’s water level is at heights not witnessed since 1911, the Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported. Yet water levels on the Meuse were about a foot lower than would have been the case without the flood-reduction measures, Ms. Asselman said. That meant that smaller tributaries backed up less where they met the Meuse, producing less flooding.
“If we wouldn’t have implemented these measures, then the situation would have been worse,” she said. “Both on the main river and the tributaries.”
Oliver Henry, a firefighter with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, after helping extinguish a small fire in Mattawa, Wash., last month.Credit…Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
An increasingly hot, dry and deadly summer has gripped much of the Western United States, with heat claiming lives in the Pacific Northwest and Canada in record numbers, and a deepening drought threatening water supplies — all of which is setting the stage for another potentially catastrophic fire season in California and neighboring states.
A fourth major heat wave was forecast to roast parts of the region again this weekend. It comes two weeks after a record-shattering spate of high temperatures — which scientists said would been virtually impossible without climate change — killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada.
A week ago, Death Valley hit a 130-degree high, matching a reading from last year that may be the highest reliably recorded temperature on earth. Also this past weekend, Las Vegas tied its record high, 117 degrees, and Grand Junction, Colo., topped its previous record, hitting 107 degrees.
At least 67 weather stations from Washington State through New Mexico have recorded their hottest temperatures ever this summer, the National Weather Service said this week. Those records stretched back at least 75 years.
The heat helped drive the rapid growth of a wildfire in southern Oregon, known as the Bootleg Fire, that has burned more than 240,000 acres — about a third the size of Rhode Island, America’s smallest state. The fire, the largest of dozens across the West, has destroyed about two dozen homes, threatens 1,900 more and has set off a wave of evacuations.
The fire also burned across a power line corridor that serves as a major contributor to the electrical grid in California, where officials have issued warnings this week asking residents to conserve power by turning up their thermostats and turning off appliances, or risk rolling blackouts.
One part of the West saw some relief from the crushing heat this week, as monsoon rains fell on the Southwest, including New Mexico and Arizona. But the result was yet another disaster: flash flooding that left some city streets in Arizona awash in muddy water and propelled a torrent of water through part of the Grand Canyon, washing away a camp where about 30 people on a rafting trip were spending the night, killing one.
As the Earth warms from climate change, heat waves are becoming hotter and more frequent. “And as bad as it might seem today,” Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, recently told The New York Times, “this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
devastation from the floods came from all around Western Europe as the death toll passed 125 on Friday, with another 1,300 people still missing. Roads buckled and washed away. Cars piled atop one another. Houses were inundated to the roof tiles. Frightened residents were being evacuated in the shovels of earth movers.
But nowhere was affected more than Germany, where hundreds were still unaccounted for and the death toll had reached 106 and was expected to rise as rescue workers combed through the debris. At least 20 were reported dead in Belgium.
A European weather agency had issued an “extreme” flood warning after detailed models showed storms that threatened to send rivers surging to levels that a German meteorologist said on Friday had not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.
German officials said Friday their warning system, which includes a network of sensors that measure river levels in real time, functioned as it was supposed to. The problem, they said, was an amount of rain they had never seen before — falling so rapidly that it engorged even small streams and rivers not normally considered threats.
Extreme downpours like the ones that occurred in Germany are among the most visible and damaging signs that the climate is changing as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that they are now occurring more frequently, and scientists point to a simple reason: A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which creates extreme rainfall.
In Central Europe rescue efforts were hampered, with electricity and communications networks down, roads and bridges washed out, and drinking water scarce. The worst hit were thinly populated, rural areas.
In the city of Schleitheim, Switzerland, where a river burst its banks, residents recorded videos of cars being washed through the streets in a swirling flood of muddy water and debris.
Germans struggled even to grasp the scale of the calamity in their country. Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her shock and solidarity from Washington, where she was visiting the White House. Politicians of all stripes called for a truce in the German election campaign. The focus was on how to deal with a disaster that was growing by the hour, with thousands left homeless, in addition to the missing.
In Belgium,the Meuse river overflowed its banks, flooding villages and the center of Liège, leaving thousands without power. The official death toll stands at 20 dead and 20 missing, the authorities said.
“We are still waiting for the final assessment, but these floods could have been the most disastrous that our country has ever known,” Alexander De Croo, Belgium’s prime minister said on Friday.
Relatives of those missing grappled with the fear of the unknown. The authorities in the Ahrweiler district of Rhineland-Palatinate said late Thursday that 1,300 people remained unaccounted for in their region, where the Ahr river swelled to an angry torrent late Wednesday, ripping through the towns and villages that hugged its banks.
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One of the places in Germany hardest hit by the flooding was tiny Schuld, where the destruction arrived with remarkable speed in the once-tidy village. After the river swelled, vehicles bobbed like bath toys, six houses collapsed and half of those that remained standing had gaping holes torn by floating debris.
“It went so fast. You tried to do something, and it was already too late,” a resident of Schuld told Germany’s ARD public television.
At least 50 people were confirmed dead in the Ahrweiler district, where torrents of water rushed through towns and villages, washing away cars, homes and businesses.
In Sinzig, a town in the district, efforts to evacuate a care home for people with severe disabilities came just moments before the gushing waters swept through the lower levels, killing 12 of the residents.
A church and cemetery after flooding in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany.Credit…Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via Shutterstock
BERLIN — Days before roiling waters tore through western Germany, a European weather agency issued an “extreme” flood warning after detailed models showed storms that threatened to send rivers surging to levels that a German meteorologist said on Friday had not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.
By Friday those predictions proved devastatingly accurate, with at least 125 people dead and 1,300 unaccounted for, as helicopter rescue crews plucked marooned residents from villages inundated sometimes within minutes, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s elaborate flood warning system.
Numerous areas, victims and officials said, were caught unprepared when normally placid brooks and streams turned into torrents that swept away cars, houses and bridges and everything else in their paths.
“It went so fast. You tried to do something, and it was already too late,” a resident of Schuld told Germany’s ARD public television, after the Ahr River swelled its banks, ripping apart tidy wood-framed houses and sending vehicles bobbing like bath toys.
Extreme downpours like the ones that occurred in Germany are one of the most visible signs that the climate is changing as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have shown a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, generating more, and more powerful, rainfall.
The floods that cut a wide path of destruction this week through Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands were bigger than any on record, according to meteorologists and German officials.
German officials said Friday their warning system, which includes a network of sensors that measure river levels in real time, functioned as it was supposed to. The problem, they said, was an amount of rain they had never seen before — falling so rapidly that it engorged even small streams and rivers not normally considered threats.
To describe the events of recent days as a 100-year flood would be an understatement, said Uwe Kirsche, a spokesman for the German Weather Service.
“With these small rivers, they have never experienced anything like that,” Mr. Kirsche said. “Nobody could prepare because no one expected something like this.”
On Tuesday, Felix Dietsch, a meteorologist for the German Weather Service, went on YouTube to warn that some areas of southwest Germany could receive previously unimaginable volumes of rain.
The weather service, a government agency, assigned its most extreme storm warning, code purple, to the Eifel and Mosel regions, one of numerous government warnings issued on Twitter and other media earlier this week and transmitted to state and local officials.
But the waters rose so swiftly that some communities’ response plans were insufficient while others were caught off guard entirely.
Medard Roth, the mayor of Kordel, in the hard-hit state of Rhineland-Palatinate, said that he activated his town’s emergency flood response once Kyll River approached dangerous water levels. But the waters rose too rapidly to be held back by the usual measures.
“By 6 p.m., everything was already under water,” Mr. Roth told Bild, a German newspaper. “Nobody could have predicted that.”
Ursula Heinen-Esser, the environment minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said on Friday that floodwaters had reached “levels never before recorded.”
The German flood warning system leaves it up to local officials to decide what action to take, on the theory that they are best informed about local terrain and what people or property lies in the path of an overflowing river.
In the Ahrweiler district of neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, regional officials issued their first warning to residents living near the banks of the river as it approached its record level of 3 meters, or nearly 10 feet. Three hours later, a state of emergency was declared.
By that time, many people had fled to the upper levels of their homes, and those who could not move fast enough died, including 12 handicapped people in an assisted living home in Sinzig.
“The warnings arrived,” Mr. Kirsche of the German Weather Service said. “But the question is why didn’t evacuations take place sooner? That’s something we have to think about.”
The bridge over the Ahr River in Müsch was destroyed in this week’s flooding.Credit…Steven Erlanger/The New York Times
MÜSCH, Germany — The bridge that spans the River Ahr washed away last night at around 10:00, said Michael Stoffels, 32, whose own house got flooded by about 12 feet of water.
Müsch, a village of 220 people at the junction of the Ahr and Trierbach rivers, was clobbered by the flash floods that have inundated this part of Germany. Only one person has died, but Müsch on Friday evening was without electricity, running water or cellphone coverage.
Residents and their friends were trying to clean up their battered homes, cracked streets and ruined cars. Local firefighters, like Nils Rademacher, 21, were managing the traffic of bulldozers, small trucks and backhoes, while instructing drivers that roads farther into the river valley were blocked with trees or made impassable by fallen bridges.
“A lot of good cars crashed or got crushed,’’ said Maria Vazquez, who works in a nearby auto repair shop. “I work with cars, so that’s sad, but I just hope that all the people are OK.”
The water rose to flood the village in less than two hours on Wednesday, and came halfway up the houses, Ms. Vazquez said.
The riverbanks were scenes of devastation, with crushed cars and thick tree stumps, while many of the cobbled streets were covered with mud and debris. Truckloads of broken furniture, tree branches and chunks of stone were being driven slowly over downed power lines.
The yellow road sign that tells drivers that they have entered Müsch was pulled out of the ground, laying bent and nearly adrift in the Trierbach River.
Mr. Stoffels said that he had no warning from the government, but that he rushed home from the retail store he manages nearby when a neighbor called. He was lucky, he said, since he has storage on the ground level and his living area is above that. The children’s playground next to his home, along the Ahr, was shattered, as was the main village electrical station, even before the bridge washed away.
He and his brother, who traveled 100 miles to help, and his friends, all wearing boots and muddy clothes, were trying to clean up as best they could. It helped, he said, that Müsch, in the Ahrweiler District of Rhineland-Palatinate close to the border with North Rhine-Westphalia, is farming country.
“Nearly everyone has a small tractor or a bulldozer of some kind,’’ he said. And it was true — the local firefighters were there, but there was little government presence, residents said. On Thursday, Mr. Stoffels said, “a couple of soldiers came for a time and a policeman looked around.”
Not far away, larger villages and towns were devastated, and more than 1,000 people are reported missing by the authorities.
Roger Lewentz, Rhineland-Palatinate’s interior minister, was unable to give an exact number of missing in his state.
“We do not yet know for sure whether some of them may be on vacation or simply unavailable. After all, the power and telephone connections are down in many affected locations,” he told Der Spiegel.
“There haven’t been floods like this here in 100 years,’’ said Sebastian Stich, 28, an office worker from nearby Barweiler who came to help his neighbors. “The bridges, the power, it’s all gone.’’
Part of the historic center of Prague, Czech Republic, was underwater in August 2002.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The floods devastating Europe have killed scores of people, leaving at least 1,300 missing, uprooting families, causing massive financial damage and reducing homes and cars to the state of floating bath toys.But it is not the first time the continent has been buffeted by a deluge. Here are some of the other major lethal floods and flooding caused by storms in recent years:
February and May 2014
A house damaged by flooding in Krupanj, Serbia, in 2014.Credit…Dragan Karadarevic/European Pressphoto Agency
A 7-year-old boy dead after falling ill in a flooded home in Surrey. A kayaker drowned on a swollen Welsh river.A coastal railroad ripped up by waves in Cornwall.In a matter of months in 2014, at least 5,000 houses in Britain were damaged in what was then seen as one of the rainiest seasons in nearly 250 years. While some blamed the flooding on the austerity measures of David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, others pointed to climate change. In May of that same year, the heaviest rains and floods in 120 years hit Bosnia and Serbia, killing at least 33 people, forcing thousands out of their homes, and cutting off power in 100,000 households in Serbia, as several months’ worth of rainfall fell in a matter of days.
June 2013
A house near Deggendorf, Germany, surrounded by floodwaters in June 2013.Credit…Armin Weigel/European Pressphoto Agency
Germany is no stranger to flooding. In Bitterfeld, in eastern Germany, some 10,000 people were asked to leave their homes in June 2013 after a levee on the Mulde River burst, amid some of the worst flooding that some German regions had seen in centuries. More than 600 residents of Dresden were brought to safety as electricity and water services to the city’s affected center were cut off. Chancellor Angela Merkel, now tested by the current flooding, showed her mettle at the time, touring three of the hardest hit areas to wade through ankle-deep floodwaters and visit victims of the flood.
January 2007
Storm-driven waves batter the port of Wimereux in northern France in 2007.Credit…Philippe Huguen/Agence France-Presse
The storm was called Kyrill by German meteorologists, and it spurred unrelenting rain in Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The howling gale churned through the British Isles and Northern Europe, uprooting trees, shattering windows, flooding beaches and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights at airports from London to Frankfurt. According to the European Environment Agency, Kyrill killed 46 people and resulted in overall losses worth 8 billion euros. At the time, it was one of the most damaging extreme weather episodes ever recorded in Europe. The name Kyrill stemmed from a German practice of naming weather systems. Anyone may name one, for a fee, and three siblings had paid to name the system as a 65th birthday gift for their father, not realizing it would grow into a fierce storm.
August 2005
A woman emptying a bucket into the flooded Aare River in Thun, Switzerland, in 2005.Credit…Peter Schneider/Keystone, via Associated Press
Such was the deluge in Central and Southern Europe in 2005 that in the Alps, military helicopters were deployed to ferry in supplies, evacuate stranded tourists and even stranded cows in mountain pastures threatened by rising water. The floods left dozens dead. In Romania, which was badly affected by the flooding, victims were drowned as torrents of water rushed into their homes. Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Switzerland were also buffeted by the flooding. The scenes of devastation were visceral and shocking. The Aare River broke through the windows of a children’s clothes shop in Bern, leaving baby strollers and toys floating in muddy water. Much of the historic old city of Lucerne remained underwater. Meanwhile, in southern Poland, rivers broke their banks and at least seven bridges collapsed.
August 2002
Rescue workers in rafts searched for residents stranded by flooding in Prague in 2002.Credit…Sean Gallup/Getty Images
In 2002, some of the worst rains since 1890 pelted the Czech Republic, putting part of the historic center of Prague underwater and resulting in 50,000 residents being ordered to evacuate, as rivers swelled by near constant rain. The death toll from the floods, which ravaged East and Central Europe, including Germany and Austria, and southern Russia, was more than 110. The flooding caused billions of dollars worth of damage. The floods helped propel Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to re-election because of his management of the crisis. In Austria, the Salzach River burst its banks south of Salzburg and threatened to inundate the city at the height of its famous summer festival, forcing the authorities to close most bridges and major roads. Floodwaters rose in Hungary and Germany, and in northern Austria the authorities halted river traffic on parts of the Danube.
The Ahr river overran its banks in the village of Insul, Germany. Credit…Michael Probst/Associated Press
Was the flooding caused by climate change?
Tying a single weather event to climate change requires extensive attribution analysis, and that takes time, but scientists know one thing for sure: Warmer air holds more moisture, and that makes it more likely that any given storm will produce more precipitation.
For every 1 Celsius degree of warming, in fact, air can hold 7 percent more moisture.
On average, the world has warmed by a little more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century, when societies began pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“Any storm that comes along now has more moisture to work with,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “That’s the straightforward connection to the increased frequency of heavy downpours.”
And, although it is still a subject of debate, some scientists say climate change might be causing storms to linger longer.
Some studies suggest that rapid warming in the Arctic is affecting the jet stream. One consequence of that, said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University in England, is that the river of wind is weakening and slowing down at certain times during the year, including summer. And that, in turn, affects weather systems farther south.
“That means the storms have to move more slowly,” Dr. Fowler said. The storm that caused the flooding was practically stationary, she noted.
The combination of more moisture and a stalled storm system means a lot of rain can fall over a given area.
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, one of the primary scientists with World Weather Attribution, a group that quickly analyzes specific extreme weather events to see whether they were made more likely, or not, by climate change, said the group was discussing whether they would study the German floods.
Beyond the speed of a weather system and its moisture content, there are many factors that affect flooding that can make an analysis difficult. Local topography has to be taken into account, as that can affect how much runoff gets into which rivers.
Human impacts can complicate the analysis even further. Development near rivers, for instance, can make runoff worse by reducing the amount of open land that can absorb rain. Infrastructure built to cope with heavy runoff and rising rivers may be under-designed and inadequate.
Oliver Henry, a firefighter with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, after helping extinguish a small fire in Mattawa, Wash., last month.Credit…Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
An increasingly hot, dry and deadly summer has gripped much of the Western United States, with heat claiming lives in the Pacific Northwest and Canada in record numbers, and a deepening drought threatening water supplies — all of which is setting the stage for another potentially catastrophic fire season in California and neighboring states.
A fourth major heat wave was forecast to roast parts of the region again this weekend. It comes two weeks after a record-shattering spate of high temperatures — which scientists said would been virtually impossible without climate change — killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada.
A week ago, Death Valley hit a 130-degree high, matching a reading from last year that may be the highest reliably recorded temperature on earth. Also this past weekend, Las Vegas tied its record high, 117 degrees, and Grand Junction, Colo., topped its previous record, hitting 107 degrees.
At least 67 weather stations from Washington State through New Mexico have recorded their hottest temperatures ever this summer, the National Weather Service said this week. Those records stretched back at least 75 years.
The heat helped drive the rapid growth of a wildfire in southern Oregon, known as the Bootleg Fire, that has burned more than 240,000 acres — about a third the size of Rhode Island, America’s smallest state. The fire, the largest of dozens across the West, has destroyed about two dozen homes, threatens 1,900 more and has set off a wave of evacuations.
The fire also burned across a power line corridor that serves as a major contributor to the electrical grid in California, where officials have issued warnings this week asking residents to conserve power by turning up their thermostats and turning off appliances, or risk rolling blackouts.
One part of the West saw some relief from the crushing heat this week, as monsoon rains fell on the Southwest, including New Mexico and Arizona. But the result was yet another disaster: flash flooding that left some city streets in Arizona awash in muddy water and propelled a torrent of water through part of the Grand Canyon, washing away a camp where about 30 people on a rafting trip were spending the night, killing one.
As the Earth warms from climate change, heat waves are becoming hotter and more frequent. “And as bad as it might seem today,” Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, recently told The New York Times, “this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
The overflowing Meuse River near Aasterberg, the Netherlands, on Friday.Credit…Sem Van Der Wal/EPA, via Shutterstock
A breach in the dike along the Juliana Canalin the southern Netherlands on Friday was closed by the Dutch military by dumping hundreds of sandbags into the growing hole. Hours before, thousands had been told to evacuate after the dike was breached along thecanal, a 22-mile waterway that regulates the Meuse River.
The river’s water level is at heights not witnessed since 1911, the Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported.
That is no small thing is a water-logged country where taming water has been a matter of survival for centuries and the imperative to keep levels under control is inextricably bound up with Dutch identity.Much of the country sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Climate change has also exacerbated the twin threats of storms and rising tides.
Residents of the villages of Brommelen, Bunde, Geulle and Voulwames were ordered to evacuate immediately, after initially being told to move to higher floors in their homes. About 10,000 people live in the area.
The local authorities said there was “a large hole” in the dike, prompting fears that the entire area would be flooded. While parts of the area were flooded, a disaster was averted after the breach was closed. NOS said the dike was still unstable and continued to be monitored.
Upriver, near the city of Venlo, evacuations were ordered for whole neighborhoods and surrounding villages, in total10,700 people and 7,100 houses, the municipality said in a tweet. People have until 6 p.m. local time to leave their homes.
Record water levels are moving through the Meuse River, prompting evacuations andfresh inspections of dikes along the river that empties into the North Sea. The river is a key waterway for European shipping connections.
Following flooding in recent decades, the Dutch authorities have designated special areas that can be flooded with excess water when critical levels are reached.
The Netherlands has so far been spared much of the death and destruction that this week’s flooding has caused in Germany and Belgium. But in Valkenburg, a city in the south of the Netherlands with about 16,000 residents, damage was severe. Hundreds of houses were without power, and the center of the city was flooded.
“The damage is incalculable,” Mayor Daan Prevoo of Valkenburg told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. He predicted that repairs would take weeks.
Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany
Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via Shutterstock
Schuld, Germany
Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock
Ensival, Belgium
Stephanie Lecocq/EPA, via Shutterstock
Erftstadt, Germany
Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters
Jemelle, Belgium
John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Valkenburg, The Netherlands
Sem Van Der Wal/ANP, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Aasterberg, The Netherlands
Sem Van Der Wal/ANP, via Agence France-Presse
Schuld, Germany
Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock
Rowing a boat down a flooded residential street in Angleur, on the outskirts of Liège, Belgium, on Friday.Credit…Valentin Bianchi/Associated Press
In Liège, Belgium’s third-largest city, much of the early panic eased on Friday as residents said the waters of the Meuse river seemed to recede, at least a bit.
Fears that a major dam might break led the mayor to call for parts of the city to be evacuated late Thursday. But on Friday, people were allowed back, though they were told to stay away from the river, which was still lapping over its banks.
“The situation is now under control, and people can return to their homes,” Laurence Comminette, the spokeswoman for the mayor, said in an interview. “Of course not everyone can go back, because many homes have been destroyed. But there is no longer an imminent danger of more flooding.”
Georges Lousberg, 78, said he thought the crisis was largely over in the city. “It did not rain much today, and the weather is supposed to be better the rest of the week.”
He said there had been times when the Meuse was even higher, especially before walls were built along its banks. “The worst flooding was in 1926,” he said.
Prasanta Char, 34, a postdoctoral student in physics at the University of Liège, said he had been anxious about rain overnight after the mayor’s evacuation call.
He had gone looking to buy water, but had a hard time because so many stores were closed. He finally found a small convenience store in the shuttered city.
“It’s much worse in Germany, and a lot of the roads are shut and the trains are stopped,” he said, “I’m still a bit anxious about rain, but today it seems better.”
A resident cleaning the streets of Ahrweiler-Bad Neenah, Germany, after flooding on Thursday.Credit…Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Forecasts predicting improved weather for Western Europe over the weekend offered some hope amid the deluge, potentially aiding search-and-rescue efforts in areas devastated by floods.
The heavy rain in Germany in the Ahrweiler district of Rhineland-Palatinate was forecast to let up later Friday and over the weekend, after flooding left 1,300 people unaccounted for in the region. Emergency workers put sandbags in place to stem the rising waters in the region’s remote villages, like Schuld, where heavy flows of water washed away six homes and left more close to collapse.
On Saturday and Sunday, there is about a 20 percent chance of rain in that area, and temperatures are expected to rise above 70 degrees Fahrenheitwith partial sunshine later in the day, according to Weather.com. Conditions are likewise expected to improve in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, also in western Germany, where at least 43 people have died in the flooding.
Andreas Friedrich, a meteorologist for Germany’s national weather service, said that dry, sunny weather was likely over the next few days in the western states hit by floods. The weather service has issued a warning about possible floods in the touristy area of southeastern Germany, north of the Alps, over the weekend, but conditions are not expected to be as bad as they were in the western part of the country, he said.
In Belgium, the weather is also expected to clear up over the weekend. The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium forecast only light rain in the hilly Ardennes region, which experienced heavy flooding over the past few days. In Liège, which was also hard hit, there was a 3 percent chance of precipitation on Saturday, according to the AccuWeather forecasting service.
Alex Dewalque, a spokesman for the meteorological institute, said water levels in the worst-hit parts of Belgium were already falling, making it easier for emergency workers to rescue stranded people and search for casualties. He said the coming days would be much drier and with warmer temperatures, and that there were no flood warnings.
More rain was expected in Switzerland’s northern Alps on Friday, however, and officials warned of more potential flooding in parts of the country. Lake Lucerne reached critical levels, forcing the closing of some bridges and roadways.
Sarah Schöpfer,a meteorologist at Switzerland’s Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, said she expected rainfall over the affected areas of Switzerland to lighten.
“We expect that tonight the precipitation activity weakens further and tomorrow it mainly affects the eastern Swiss Alps (mainly regions that did not get the highest amounts of rain during the last few days),” she said in an email. “So apart from the last showers today and tomorrow, the following days will be dry.”
BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers overwhelmingly called for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians in an emergency meeting on Tuesday, according to the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles.
All of the member states except Hungary backed a statement that condemned rocket attacks by Hamas and supported Israel’s right to self-defense but also cautioned that it had “to be done in a proportional manner and respecting international humanitarian law,’’ Mr. Borrell said at a news conference.
He said that the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, “including a high number of women and children,’’ was “unacceptable.’’ And he said that the European Union, as part of the quartet with the United States, Russia and the United Nations that seeks peace in the Middle East, would push to restart a serious diplomatic process.
“The priority is the immediate cessation of all violence and the implementation of a cease-fire,” Mr. Borrell said. Foreign policy in the European Union works by unanimity, so Mr. Borrell’s comments, despite Hungary’s opposition, were an effort, he said, “to reflect the overall agreement.”
evictions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
“The representatives of the European public, the ministers of foreign affairs in this case, are trying very hard to deal with the situation and find the best possible contribution by the E.U. to de-escalate and stop the violence,” he said. “And I think that’s it. I can only repeat that of course the casualties are unacceptable.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
The scion of a business family, Mr. Gupta established a metals trading business in the 1990s while a student at Cambridge University. In 2015, he turned his attention to the production side, going on a buying spree of steel and other metal plants in Britain, and later in other countries like Romania, France and the United States.
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The loss of financing from Greensill has posed a serious threat to Mr. Gupta’s businesses, which employ around 35,000 people, including 5,000 in Britain. Mr. Gupta has been scrambling to find new financing to save these businesses, but the disclosure of a high-level fraud investigation could complicate these efforts.
The British government has rejected a request for 170 million pounds (about $240 million) to support the Gupta businesses, citing their “opaque accounting,” according to another parliamentary committee that is investigating the businesses and the British steel industry.
A spokesman for the Gupta companies said the group “will cooperate fully” with the Serious Fraud Office investigation and that the group was “making progress in the refinancing of its operations.”
A spokesman for Greensill did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Greensill and Gupta had interests across the world, some of the strongest repercussions of the Greensill collapse have been in Britain, where former Prime Minister David Cameron served as a senior adviser to the financial company.
Mr. Cameron has faced withering criticism for his lobbying of senior politicians and officials on behalf of Greensill, often using emails and WhatsApp messages to make appeals to the highest ministers, including Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Cameron has said he should have used more formal means of communication.
At a video appearance before a parliamentary committee investigating the Greensill collapse on Thursday, Mr. Cameron appeared to show little contrition despite sharp criticism from lawmakers, one of whom characterized his dozens of approaches to government figures as “more like stalking than lobbying.”
The needles at Bran Castle in the Transylvania region of Romania won’t be drawing blood — instead, they’ll be administering a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Vaccines will be available every weekend in May without an appointment at the castle, which says it is “the only castle in all of Transylvania” that fits the description of Dracula’s castle in the novel about the vampire.
People who get vaccines there will get “free access to the exhibition with medieval torture tools,” the castle said on its Facebook page. But venturing to the castle for the shots and scares wouldn’t be wise for international travelers, as the vaccines are available at the castle only to residents of Romania, Bran Castle’s marketing manager, Alexandru Priscu, told The Associated Press.
Amid concerns in Romania that demand for vaccines is slowing, Mr. Priscu said, “we wanted to show people a different way to get the needle.”
Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. New daily coronavirus cases there have dropped significantly — around 1,200 each day on average — since spikes in November and March.
The castle joins the many weird and occasionally beautiful places around the world that are doubling as vaccine spots, some for convenience and some hoping to entice people by the location. They include Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, the American Museum of Natural History, on the sand in Miami Beach and a ski resort in Colorado.
BUCHAREST, Romania — The apparent killing of a large brown bear in Romania by a member of the Liechtenstein royal family has set off a wave of anger across the southeastern European country, which officially banned trophy hunting in 2016 but allows the killing of bears deemed to be problematic. Permits to kill these bears can cost many thousands of dollars.
The killing, which took place in March, came to light this week after two environmental groups accused Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein of killing the bear, nicknamed Arthur, in a protected area of the Carpathian Mountains. Romanian police have opened a criminal investigation into Arthur’s death, with poaching one of the potential charges.
While the prince, who lives in Austria, had been granted a permit by the Romanian environment ministry to shoot a cub-rearing female bear that had been causing damage to farms, he has been accused of killing Arthur instead.
Attempts to contact the prince’s office went unanswered. Earlier in the week the office told the Agence France-Presse news agency that it didn’t know anything about what it called a “private and personal matter.”
with tensions regularly flaring up between bear populations and rural communities. Romania’s official bear population is 6,000, but on Thursday evening Mr. Barna said there were over 7,000 bears in the country.
Romania banned trophy hunting in 2016, but grants permits for the killing of bears that have endangered human lives and property, and only then as a last resort after options like relocation have failed. Official documents show that Prince Emanuel was granted a four-day permit in March, which allegedly cost him about $8,500.
While hunting associations help to keep dangerous bears in check, there are concerns that the system in place is ineffective and ripe for abuse.
Octavian Berceanu, the head of Romania’s National Environmental Guard protection agency, said that there were significant issues with the documentation justifying the recent killing.
“They said for 20 days in a row they observed a bear causing a lot of damage,” he said of the hunting association that had applied for the permit used by the prince’s group, adding the application was “missing any evidence, missing a picture or pictures. Those papers are made without objective proof, just a report that for 20 days a bear came here and made damages.”
Others also see larger, systemic issues with giving out permits.
“Starting from the second half of 2017, the vast majority were actually used in reality for trophy hunting and they were justified” by citing damage caused by the animals, said Csaba Domokos, a bear expert with the Milvus Group, a conservation organization, referring to the special permits.
“In most cases the bears that eventually ended up being shot had nothing to do” with the damage for which the permits had been granted, he said.
Mr. Domokos said that a lot of property damage is caused by females with cubs. But hunters do not like killing female bears, especially those with cubs, so they often report that solitary males are responsible and hunt them.
“These big bears are the least likely to cause these kinds of problems because otherwise they would not have gotten to that size,” he said.
BAGHDAD — A fire sparked by an exploding oxygen cylinder killed at least 82 people, most of them Covid-19 patients and their relatives, at a Baghdad hospital late Saturday, a devastating example of the pandemic’s impact on a country riddled with corruption and a legacy of decrepit infrastructure.
The hospital, a facility dedicated to Covid-19 patients in one of Baghdad’s poorer neighborhoods, had no smoke detectors, sprinkler system or fire hoses, said Maj. Gen. Khadhim Bohan, the head of Iraq’s civil defense forces. The fire spread quickly because of flammable material used in false ceilings in the intensive care ward, he added.
“If there had been smoke detectors, the situation would have been totally different,” General Bohan told the state-run Iraqiya TV.
Doctors and rescuers described a chaotic scene at the hospital, crowded with relatives of patients despite what was supposed to be a ban on most visitors to avoid the spread of infection. Because of a lack of nursing staff, Iraqi hospitals, even in Covid wards, require a relative to help look after a patient.
report early this year warned of the dangers of hospital fires because of increased oxygen use. It reported almost 70 people were killed in hospital fires around the world related to supplemental oxygen last year, including 10 in Romania. A more recent fire in April in Romania, where intensive care units have also been overwhelmed, killed three patients.
An Iraqi health ministry spokesman said the Ibn al-Khatib hospital, where the fire broke out, was originally built in the 1950s and had been renovated last year to refit it for treating Covid patients. He declined to comment on why the renovation did not include smoke detectors or a sprinkler system, saying that was now under investigation.
Among the dead were some older patients on ventilators who could not move from their beds when the fire started, officials said.
One Facebook notice listed five members of one family who died in the fire: a tribal sheikh being treated for Covid, his wife and their three sons.
“It was a horrible scene,” said Dr. Waad Adnan, a hospital resident who was in the physicians’ quarters next to the hospital when the fire started. “There was the sound of explosions and then huge balls of fire,” he added.
Dr. Adnan, who spoke outside the hospital, said he saw patients and their relatives breaking windows and throwing themselves from the second floor to escape the blaze.
He said the fire was believed to have started when an oxygen cylinder caught fire and then exploded.
“The hospital staff did their best to turn off the central oxygen, but the cylinders began exploding,” he said.
A neighborhood tuk-tuk driver, Ahmed Hassan, said he and other drivers rushed to the hospital to try to help a friend’s aunt who was being treated for Covid, but when they arrived, they found she had already died.
“I couldn’t see anything but heavy smoke and people running and shouting and charred bodies,” said Mr. Hassan, 19. “I heard screaming and saw smoke and people cursing the hospital staff for not helping the patients.”
He said he and other young men spent an hour running in and out of the hospital trying to rescue patients while the fire burned. Some were able to walk, while others, he said, he pulled from their beds.
“I found one of the people who was not able to move and I yelled, ‘This man is still alive, we can save him!’” he said. The older man clung to him and asked him not to leave him. He said, “‘Please, this is my phone. If I die tell my family I forgive them for everything.’”
The man died on Sunday.
Mr. Hassan said he helped rescue a nurse as well as other patients and their relatives. Iraq’s pharmaceutical association said at least one pharmacist died in the blaze.
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Khadimi called the fire a crime and ordered an investigation within 24 hours into possible negligence at the hospital.
He ordered the detention for questioning of the health director for the Rasfah area of Baghdad, where the hospital is. The hospital’s director and its head of engineering and maintenance were also ordered detained.
President Barham Salih said the tragedy was a “result of the accumulated destruction of state institutions due to corruption and mismanagement,” in a post on Twitter.
“Showing pain and sympathy with our martyrs and injured sons is not enough without strenuous accountability for the negligent.”
Nermeen al-Mufti and Awadh al-Taiee contributed reporting.
