REICHERTSHOFEN: Rescuers battled on Monday to evacuate people from floods in southern Germany that have claimed four lives, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it a “warning” that climate change was getting worse.

Thousands of people in the regions of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg had to leave their homes since torrential rain on Friday sparked deadly flooding. More evacuations were called overnight into Monday as the huge volumes of water caused flood defences to fail.

In Bavaria, around 800 people were asked to leave their homes in the area of Ebenhausen-Werk after a dam burst on Monday. Residents around Manching-Pichl, in the area worst affected by the floods, were told to shelter on the upper floors of their homes.

Speaking on a visit to Reichertshofen, in a flood-hit area north of Munich, Scholz said that such floods were no longer a “one-off”. “This is an indication that something is up here. We must not neglect the task of stopping man-made climate change,” Scholz told journalists. The floods were “a warning that we must take with us”, he said.

The Bavarian state premier, Markus Soeder, who accompanied Scholz on his visit, said there was no “full insurance” against climate change. “Events are happening here that have never happened before,” Soeder said, after a state of emergency was declared by districts across his region of Bavaria. Around 20,000 people in Bavaria alone had been deployed to tackle the consequences of the flood, he said.

Police in Baden-Wuerttemberg on Monday said a man and a woman were found dead in the basement of their house in Schorndorf following the flood. The same fate befell a 43-year-old woman in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria, whose body was found by rescuers earlier on Monday.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2024