Defying the floods

"Sometimes things look worse than they are." That's the opinion of water facility worker Michael Hietze in Frankfurt an der Oder. The cellar rooms of his company's building are on the brink of being flooded. The lower-lying areas in the vicinity are already under water. But it's not yet the water from the nearby Oder river knocking on the door. It's the ground water that has been forced upwards.

"This time around it's different. We're prepared, and I don't expect the high water levels to last for more than a week," Hietze told Deutsche Welle.

He also witnessed the record high floods in 1997 when everything happened overnight and caught residents by surprise. And he remembers the dams and dykes giving way during the ensuing three weeks during which the floodwater didn't recede at all.

Investment set to pay off

Hietze thinks he has good reasons for his optimism. He points out that millions of euros (dollars) have gone into repairing old dams and building new ones. This, he says, should help prevent the worst. And the sandbags which a forklift truck is transporting to strategic points within the company compound should help keep cellar rooms dry.

Further upstream, most people are equally relaxed. In the small settlement of Brieskow-Finkenheerd – the scene of dramatic flooding in 1997 – the highest alert level is now in place and so-called dyke-runners have gone into action. A team walks the dykes around the clock, looking for leaks. Martin Goehler, a retired fire-fighter, is one of them.

"Looking after things has always been what we do. And since we live here, we have a vested interest in protecting ourselves as best as we can," he says.

The homes of Goehler's daughter and sister were badly damaged in the 1997 flooding, but he doesn't believe that anyone in his family will be hit that hard this time around. Small sections of the dyke which don't appear water-tight will immediately be repaired, at least that's the plan.

A matter of timing

In the town of Eisenhuettenstadt close to the confluence of the Oder and Neisse rivers, hundreds of residents are busy piling up sandbags to protect their homes. Detlef Staude is a tenant in a recently-renovated house on the banks of the Oder. He and other tenants would have liked to fill more sandbags earlier. But it would have been an expensive business.

"Only now that the highest alert level is in place are we getting hundreds of bags and tons of sand for free," Staude says. "They could really have supplied us with the stuff a few days earlier. Then we wouldn't have had to work through the night."

Apart from that, there's little criticism of the crisis management to be heard. There's widespread agreement that the lesson from 1997 has been learned – namely, that higher and stronger dykes needed to be built, something that was done with the help of EU funding.

Author: Hardy Graupner

Editor: Susan Houlton