97 percent of the 103,000 landline connections damaged in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia during the flood disaster last summer have been restored. Deutsche Telekom announced that a third of the remaining 3,000 connections will be repaired in the first quarter of 2022.
Around 2000 connections cannot be restored because infrastructure such as roads, bridges and houses have been completely destroyed. Deutsche Telekom states that it provided the affected customers with free, cellular-based replacement products immediately after the flood.
During the repair work, Telekom began to build an FTTH (Fiber to the Home) network in the particularly badly affected flood areas, in which the flood had permanently damaged the existing copper network. In 2022, a total of around 40,000 households and company locations are to be connected directly with fiber optics. In the following year, a further 25,000 FTTH connections are to be added in the NRW municipalities concerned alone.
Vodafone donates
From July 12th to 15th of this year there was persistent heavy rain in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, killing over a hundred people and many losing their homes. Telecom competitor Vodafone is equipping 180 of them with a so-called tiny house with mobile communications, internet and TV and is providing one million euros for this.
Scientists see a connection between the disaster and climate change. The higher global average temperature has increased the likelihood of such events. The heavy rain led to floods, some of which were favored by narrow valleys with steep slopes that had a funnel-like effect. In addition, the soils were partly very saturated. Up until then, such an event had statistically occurred once every 500 years or less on the Ahr. The man-made rise in temperature to date has increased the likelihood of such extreme rainfall by 1.2 to 9 times. The intensity of extreme precipitation has also increased by between 3 and 19 percent.
(anw)