The processing of the flood of 2021 brings Anne Spiegel, then Minister of the Environment of Rhineland-Palatinate, in justification. Was her own image more important to her than the need on the Ahr?
Anne Spiegel from the Greens heads the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.
When the investigative committee of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament meets again this Friday, the political fate of the federal family minister will be negotiated. Before Anne Spiegel moved to Berlin, the Green politician was Minister for Climate Protection and the Environment in Mainz. During the flood disaster in July 2021, which the committee set up by the opposition CDU has been working on since October last year, Spiegel’s house was responsible for flood protection and flood warning.
Several media are now quoting internal messages from and to Spiegel. Two accusations result from this: Spiegel is said not to have warned of the flood in good time – and in the crucial hours her own image was said to have been more important to her than the dramatic situation on the Ahr. The minister is also to address this complex of issues in the committee on Friday evening.
Who knew when what?
Mayschoss, Ahrweiler, guilt: The names of these and other communities in the south-west German state stand for a flood disaster of historic proportions, 134 people lost their lives and almost 800 were injured when the Ahr burst its banks at high speed. The economic damage is enormous and far from being worn away.
The committee of inquiry into the flood disaster wants to reconstruct the decisions of the two days in July and clarify whether the state government and the authorities made “errors, omissions or breaches of duty or omissions”. Particular attention is paid to the question of which warnings were raised via which channels, where they were received and to whom they were passed on.
In addition to Prime Minister Marie-Luise Dreyer and Interior Minister Roger Lewentz (both SPD), then Environment Minister Spiegel played a key role. Although the municipalities are responsible for civil protection, flood risk management is the responsibility of the Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy and Mobility.
Please gender!
On July 14, when the water levels began to rise, Anne Spiegel praised the “well-functioning reporting chains” in the Mainz state parliament and boasted that Rhineland-Palatinate was the leader in Germany when it came to preventing heavy rain. The frequent heavy rain events “impressively showed the effects of climate change and the increase in temperature”. A little later, at 4:43 p.m., the ministry issued a press release warning of flooding, but added in Spiegel’s words that there was “no extreme flooding” – a misjudgment. According to the Koblenz “Rhein-Zeitung”, before the release, Spiegel gave the instruction “please change it”, one should write about “campsite operators”.
When the catastrophe occurred on the morning of July 15, Spiegel feared, according to the chat messages first made public by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “the blame game could start immediately, we need a wording that we warned in good time ». The addressee was her then press spokesman Dietmar Brück, currently the deputy spokesman for the state government. He had called for a “credible role” for his superiors and warned that cabinet colleagues Dreyer and Lewentz could occupy the topic for themselves.
Prime Minister Dreyer, according to Brück, “makes” the sympathy. Spiegel supported Brück in his considerations. Lewentz can be trusted to “say that the disaster could have been prevented or would not have been so bad if we, the Ministry of the Environment, had warned earlier”.
The reporting chain and the message
A high degree of distrust of the Minister of the Interior, media envy and an idiosyncratic setting of priorities speak from the news. The meeting on Friday could show which further insights into the internal communication channels might put this impression into perspective or appear in a different light. The euphemistic press release from the afternoon of July 14 was certainly a mistake, especially since on the evening of the same day the Green State Secretary Erwin Manz is said to have answered the press office with a brief “not today” when asked whether the release should be revised in view of the situation.
Does Spiegel have to take credit for the fact that her ministry stuck to an outdated level of knowledge for too long and underestimated the heavy rain and its consequences? The Mainz Ministry explains: Press releases are not part of the reporting chain. On the morning of July 15, “help for the local people” was the focus of Spiegel’s efforts.
In addition to the Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of the Interior, Roger Lewentz (left), and the state’s Environment Minister at the time, Anne Spiegel (right), Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also visited the city of Ahrweiler in October 2021.
Nevertheless, the family minister and feminist, who is said to have been “really a bit nervous” on the evening of July 14, according to an already known internal message from Dreyer, is under pressure to justify herself. The previous findings of the committee of inquiry also contribute to this. A deputy civil protection inspector criticized the “system failure” and official “diffusion of responsibility”, without which more lives could have been saved. According to a hydrologist, the population should have been evacuated on July 14 at around 3:30 p.m. – that’s when Spiegel was speaking in the state parliament.
A Karlsruhe meteorologist, on the other hand, explained that “at the latest by 4 p.m.” there was certainty that the flood of the century from 2016 would be exceeded – the Ministry of the Environment was working on the press release that no extreme floods were to be expected. The meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann, who was also invited as an expert, sets the time even earlier: Between 10 and 11 a.m. it was clear “that something would happen that has not happened since the beginning of the measurements”. Nobody, according to Kachelmann, has to die in such weather conditions.
When Anne Spiegel left Mainz for Berlin in December, the President of the State Parliament praised her stamina and her “high empathy”. In the light of the flood disaster, both virtues have become assertions that now need to be proven.