Flood disaster: This is how I experienced the flood

Rain is annoying, especially if you wear glasses and hairspray, but you usually clean your glasses, live with the sticky hair helmet for the day, and you’re done.

When I drove home in the drizzle last Tuesday, I thought I was lucky when I found a parking space right in front of the door. Hooray, two steps to the front door and the rain can hit me. Well, when I went to bed, the drizzle had turned into a solid shower, but then I had no idea that I would wake up the next morning by a river.

“How stupid I must have looked when I was standing at my living room window during my morning ventilation session on Wednesday and found flowing water below.”

How could that be? I live far away from the four rivers that flow through my city of Hagen and we’re not talking about the Rhine or the Ruhr either. Okay, Eckstrasse is called Bachstrasse, but that’s just a name.

As I learned during the day, when it rains, a small trickle comes out of the forest above my road, which flows underground through pipes and eventually into one of the smaller rivers. Well, the unbelievable amounts of water from above and the actually appropriate but now totally overwhelmed drainage in this pipe system led to the fact that the Bachstrasse lived up to its name and carried water accordingly.

Water and rubble everywhere – but no electricity

Now I live on the second floor of an old building and with all the water in front of my house I was afraid that my feet would get very wet if I went out. But where was my car actually? Right in front of the door, on the last dry spot before the river. Phew! And my basement? Poof again, because the cellar shaft is also higher and not directly on the water.

Then the next surprise – there is no electricity. Like right now? And what about the morning coffee? And with showers? Blow dry Mobile phone battery? But there is always electricity! Okay, not for an hour because something is being repaired or serviced, but not that long. That is not possible! My freezer is full, how long will it last? First World Problems – clearly and how silly and actually insignificant, considering what the water has done over the past few days.

Speaking of water, that had also brought tons of rubble, which led to it flowing completely uncontrollably and taking x detours, flooding cars and filling several cellars in the neighborhood.

I didn’t have the words

What now? Go down? Take a look? Talk to those who stared at the action in a similarly speechless manner? It was just after six in the morning and someone had already put up roadblocks. Later I found out that a neighbor noticed the water when she came home at one o’clock and rang the doorbell for our landlord, who lives in the corner house on Bachstrasse. So while I had just turned around, even though I woke up briefly from the blue light, my neighbors were already handing out the few sandbags that the fire brigade had brought over and hoping to be able to contain the water in this way. That hope was gone at six in the morning.

So, first of all, send the boss and the colleague a message that I can’t come to the office. Explanation? Two photos, I missed the words. Then exchange information about the current situation in the social network. All safe? Are there more people in my area affected? At this point everything seemed to be fine with them. People were amazed at blocked roads, but managed to get to work via minor detours and were amazed that with me, sometimes only two streets away, everything was so different.

For two days everyone helped out

Then put on, look for the rubber boots that I once bought for a ten for a cowshed tour 15 years ago, and go downstairs. I had a need to speak and somehow also to act.

And then for the next two days it was time to shovel the rubble, first in the rain, later luckily without additional water from above, to the side so that a river bed could be created through which our new electricity could flow in regulated channels could. In addition, building temporary sandbag from old plastic bags and rubble, finding boards with which one could bring people across the now two-armed river and talk about the unbelievable. With people who actually only wanted to get groceries in our small shopping street, or who were on vacation with their trolley suitcases, with car owners who weren’t as lucky as I was, but their cars half in the rubble and half under There were water, with the butcher couple from across the street, who have their warehouse in the basement of the house, with the countless helpers who turned up and got to work with shovels, shovels, snow shovels, buckets and bare hands.

The solidarity was huge

During the whole of the Corona period, I kept reading reports about how disaffected people are, and how everyone thinks only of themselves. Sure, in the first lockdown older people were offered to go shopping for them, but now everyone would: r stretch their elbows and there would only be me, me, me.

There was no sign of that here in the last few days. So many people got involved. Okay, there is the saying “If you lend a hand, it’s as if two were letting go”, there were also helpers like this: inside were on duty, but in the end we could only achieve what we succeeded in here together. Namely, without any official help – other parts of the city had been hit much worse and after all, no life was threatened here – to channel the water into regular channels and to avert even greater damage.

And even on Friday, when the water was already gone, a lot of people helped to free the cars from all the gravel and rubble, clear the basement and remove the mud from the sidewalks. The garbage is still piling up in front of the houses and I haven’t opened my windows facing the street since Friday, because the smell is out of this world, but the garbage disposal can’t do any magic either and is currently working more than the collectively agreed.

Although I have certainly only achieved a fraction of what others have achieved, I had the sore muscles of my life, blisters on my hands and more than once my rubber boots full to the brim with a cocktail of rainwater and oh, I don’t really want to know, but also an unbelievably good feeling in the stomach that people are not like they are often depicted during Corona. No, they move together in an emergency. Not only in front of my door, but also in other parts of the city and neighboring cities. You help yourself.

And when a candidate for Chancellor announces himself, no one is interested in his election campaign, but just shovels, donates and simply continues to help. And that obviously not only applies to village communities, where everyone knows everyone and where you are used to helping yourself with a lack of flour, babysitting or disaster relief, but also here, in the middle of a big city. I have never seen many of the helpers here and as I found out later, some of them do not even live here, but only came by by chance and stayed to help.

I am a lucky child

The masses of water are still destroying neighborhoods in Germany, people are losing their homes or even their lives and I am sitting here in safety, the electricity is on again, the refrigerator is full and I know that my neighborhood will shrink when the going gets tough. Am I not an unbelievably lucky child?

Brigitte