The lull was short-lived. After a three-day respite, the rain returned on Wednesday, January 3, to large parts of Germany that had already been affected by major flooding since Christmas Eve. Although previously under control, the situation could become critical in several areas affected by this new bout of rainfall, which is expected to last until Saturday.

Located in the northwest of the country, the state of Lower Saxony is the hardest hit. In December 2023, 166 millimeters or rain fell, the highest level since records began in 1881. It's also more than double the average rainfall for the last month of the year.

With two million sandbags in reserve, the region has been able to cope with the rising waters until now. However, these reserves have now been exhausted, and a further one and a half million sandbags have been rushed in from other Länder, while several dikes are threatening to breach, particularly around the town of Oldenburg, near the Dutch border.

In addition to Lower Saxony, other regions are also affected: in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Saxony-Anhalt, Bavaria and Thuringia, numerous watercourses have burst their banks, roads have been closed to traffic, rail traffic has been partially interrupted, and several local authorities have decided to postpone the start of the school year by several days. In the district of Mansfeld-Südharz (Saxony-Anhalt), which Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited on Thursday, four days after having already visited another disaster area, elected representatives have requested the aid of the Bundeswehr (armed forces). The Bundeswehr could deploy around 100 soldiers from the week of January 8.

While it’s exceptional for such vast swathes of German territory to be under water at the same time, the severity of these floods bears no resemblance to those that struck the Rhineland in July 2021, killing more than 180 people. Unlike then, when torrential rains were concentrated in a few particularly deep valleys in a matter of hours, today’s floods affect flat regions: when rivers are in flood, the water has more room to spread out, sometimes for hundreds of meters on either side of the bed. In return, it rises less high and less quickly, which limits the damage.

Even if their consequences are – for the time being – far less dramatic than those of the summer of 2021, the current floods are a reminder that Germany remains relatively ill-prepared to cope with this type of event. Yet all the experts interviewed in the media these days agree that, with climate change, such episodes are likely to become more frequent, with alternating periods of more pronounced drought and heavier rainfall leading to more intense flooding due to the reduced absorption capacity of soils.

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