Our live coverage has ended for the day. Read more about the severe flooding here.
Recovery and rescue efforts continue in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands following severe flooding in those regions.
Here are the latest developments from each country:
Belgium
Germany
The Netherlands
Flood damage in the states of North Rhine Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate is severely affecting train travel in Germany, according to Germany’s rail service Deutsche Bahn.
It is warning people to avoid the region over the weekend as many trains have been canceled or will be severely delayed.
Passengers are also asked to expect a lot more travelers on the trains that are still operating.
Tickets valid through Monday can be used later or refunded, officials said.
A dam along the river Rur in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia broke Friday night, according to the regional government.
Officials have started the evacuation of about 700 residents in the Ophoven neighborhood of the city of Wassenberg.
Officials still fear more dams can break and are closely monitoring reservoirs in the region.
Germany has deployed 850 soldiers to assist with its disaster relief effort after severe flooding left at least 105 people dead in two western states, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed forces, tweeted Friday.
The Bundeswehr said 709 soldiers were deployed in 20 districts in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, before updating the figure to 850 later on Friday.
“Together with civilian helpers, the technical relief organization, fire brigades, we are pooling all available forces,” the Bundeswehr said.
Federal Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said she had spoken with her French counterpart Florence Parly who also “offered help from the French military.”
“I have ordered that missions not directly related to foreign deployments go to the end of the queue,” Kramp-Karrenbauer tweeted.
Locals in a German town badly hit by the severe flooding in North Rhine-Westphalia state are living in fear that nearby dams will collapse, a member of parliament for the state told CNN on Friday.
Speaking from the town of Erftstadt, Ralph Bombis of the Free Democratic Party told CNN’s Julia Chatterley the “biggest concern at the moment” are the water reservoirs and dams in the area.
“A lot of people have lost a lot but at the moment the rain has stopped so we hope the situation will calm down but there’s still the big water reservoirs in the area and dams,” Bombis said.
“We hope that the damage at the dams will not be too bad,” he added. “There’s a dam south of here that is 1.2 million cubic meters of water so we really hope that the damage is not big at this dam.”
The politician described how people who had decided to stay in their homes then saw their homes partly washed away last night. “Other houses, the basements flooded, everything was gone within minutes,” he said.
Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will visit the Rhein-Erft-Kreis district of North Rhine-Westphalia state on Saturday after it was hit by severe flooding, a statement released by his office said Friday.
Together with Armin Laschet, the state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, he will assess the destruction of the area and meet with rescue workers to hear more about relief efforts.
Belgium will hold a national day of mourning for flood victims on July 20, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced on Friday, saying the country stands “shoulder to shoulder” with one another.
At least 20 people have died in Belgium in floods that have also hit Germany, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
De Croo said that these “may be the most catastrophic floods our country has ever seen.”
The Belgian army is continuing with search and rescue operations with many people still stranded in their homes without electricity, along with support from the Netherlands, Luxembourg Germany, France, Italy and Austria.
“The situation is changing by the minute, and remains extremely critical in many places,” said De Croo. “The victims are the priority, rescuing is the priority, and care. All possible means are mobilized.”
He continued:
At least 105 people have died in Germany following torrential rainfalls that swept through the country, hundreds are still missing, authorities said Friday. The Europe-wide death toll now stands at 125.
The death toll in Rhineland-Palatinate has risen to at least 62, Ulrich Sopart, a police spokesperson in the city of Koblenz, told CNN. ”We fear that the number of fatalities could rise over the next few days.”
Police also say that at least 362 people have been injured. As many as 1,300 people were still unaccounted for – mainly as a result of phone lines being down – but officials now say they expect those numbers to be revised down.
The interior ministry in Germany’s most populous state populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia told CNN that the number of at least 43 deaths has not gone up from earlier Friday. Interior Ministry spokesperson Leonie Möllmann said the ministry is not providing numbers on injured or missing people at the moment.
In Belgium, there are conflicting reports regarding the death toll, with officials giving slightly differing numbers but all agreeing that the number is likely to rise.
Earlier Friday, the acting mayor of Liege Christine Defraigne said at least 22 people had died and that “we are afraid to discover more and more.”
She told Sky News that “we know the coming days are full of grieving.”
Authorities in the Netherlands are inspecting a broken embankment along the Juliana Canal in the province of Limburg, according to a safety authority spokesperson speaking with national broadcaster NOS.
The safety authorities for South Limburg have changed their guidance for residents to shelter at home, and have now asked them to leave their houses, according to a statement on their website.
The spokesperson told NOS that they would use the inspection of the embankment to determine whether an emergency reparation was needed, and if so, how to carry it out.
The German Football Association (DFB) and the German Football League (DFL) have pledged 3 million euros — or about $3.5 million — to aid floods victims in their country.
“The DFB and DFL intend to make a financial contribution to Flood Victim Aid – a they did after the floods in 2013 – by jointly setting up a relief fund with a volume of three million euros,” they said.
“’This will not be able to alleviate the human suffering. But we hope that together we can at least provide support in some areas. We consider solidarity in this crisis situation to be self-evident,” the statement continued.
Flash flooding occurs when rain falls faster than the ground can absorb it. It is “flash” because of the rapid onset; water levels can rise feet/meters in minutes.
While there are many factors that can worsen the impacts from heavy rainfall — ground type, such as soil or concrete, and how much moisture was in the ground to being with — the most important variable is how much rain falls over a period of time, or the rainfall rate.
Human-caused climate change has already fueled extreme rain events in hurricanes and in non-tropical flash flood events like we have seen this week in Europe. This is because of a simple physical relationship — known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation — between temperature and humidity.
Drought can compound this effect. Very dry soil cannot efficiently absorb water (think of trying to wet a very dry sponge). While the rain is ultimately beneficial, if a region that has been experiencing intense drought gets hit with heavy rain, flash flooding is more likely to occur.
While the overall amount of rainfall may not change over the course of the year in any given location, more of the rain is expected to fall in shorter bursts, which would tend to increase the frequency of flooding events. This was noted by scientists with the European Environmental Agency, who said that “the projected increase in frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation over large parts of Europe may increase the probability of flash floods, which pose the highest risk of fatality.”
This week’s flooding in Belgium and Germany provides an all-too perfect demonstration of this in action. It was only a few months ago that historically low water levels on the Rhine in Cologne, Germany, were disrupting shipping along the river, but now the river is swelled by two months of rain falling in just one day.
Scientists are increasingly able to quantify the impact that a warming climate is having on individual weather events.
A similar, though at first-take not as extreme, flooding event in Western Europe in 2016 that killed 18 in Germany, France, Romania and Belgium, was analyzed by scientists to see if climate change played a role in the floods. They found that a warmer climate made the flooding 80-90% more likely to occur than it was in the past before man-made climate change.
More than 150 rescue workers from France, Italy and Austria are in Belgium “providing emergency assistance to people affected by the catastrophic floods,” the European Commission (EC) said in a statement.
Belgium has “asked for the Civil Protection Mechanism to be activated and three countries have already provided or offered support,” European Commission spokesperson Stefan de Keersmaecker said.
“France, for example, has offered support in the form of boats and helicopters with several teams who have already arrived in Belgium,” he added.
“Austria has also already offered several boats, and so has Italy who offered support. They have offered a helicopters boats and a team of people. Other possibilities of other teams coming from other Member States are now being studied to see whether they can join the teams in Belgium.”
De Keersmaecker said that Germany – the country worst hit by the flooding so far – has not yet requested help from other EU states, adding that the bloc is “prepared to offer our support” if Germany asks for it by activating the Civil Protection Mechanism.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday that widespread flooding in north-western Europe is evidence of the need for urgency in acting on climate change.
Speaking at a news conference in Dublin, von der Leyen spoke of the “horrible” flooding that has taken place in Western Europe where the death toll is at least 103 in Germany and 22 in Belgium.
She added that when scientists give a clear indication of climate change, this is something where we “really, really” need to act.
“I think this is important, just in the frame that we’ve put forward now a roadmap how to fight climate change how to stop global warming,” von der Leyen said.
The EU President’s comments come after Germany’s environment minister Svenja Schulze said on Thursday that “climate change has arrived in Germany.”
“These events show the force with which the consequences of climate change can affect us all, and how important it is to prepare even better for such extreme weather events in the future,” Schulze said in a tweet.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday urged that climate action is needed to prevent disasters like this in future. ”Only if we take up the fight against climate change decisively, we will be able to prevent we will be able to keep extreme weather conditions such as those we are experiencing,” Steinmeier said in Berlin.
The regions impacted by the devastating flash floods in Germany will see ”much better weather in the coming days,” the German weather service Deutscher Wetterdienst told CNN Friday.
Weather in the worst affected flood regions North-Rhine Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate is improving, the service’s spokesperson Andreas Friedrich said.
”This will give the residents of the flooding areas and the emergency services the opportunity to continue their rescue search for missing people as well as time to clear debris,” Friedrich added.
Here’s a look at the rainfall expected in the next 48 hours:
You can check the latest forecasts here.
The death toll from severe flooding in Belgium has risen to 22 and is expected to increase further, the acting mayor of Liege Christine Defraigne told Sky News on Friday afternoon.
The military is conducting rescue efforts by boat and the situation is now under control in the centre of the city, she said.
She urged people to evacuate their homes if they can or to wait for rescue on higher floors of buildings, saying some have been stuck in their homes for two and half days without electricity.
At least 22 are dead, she said, adding “we are afraid to discover more and more”.
“The most important things in the coming days is […] to relocate people, as the best way we can do, and to help them to recover,” she continued.
Catastrophic flooding in western Europe has left dozens dead and hundreds missing – with Germany hardest-hit as its worst rainfall in a century causes severe flooding.
Large-scale rescue efforts are continuing, amid rising water, landslides and power outages. Shocking images of the devastation show entire villages underwater, with cars wedged in between collapsed buildings and debris.
Here’s the latest of where things stand:
Death toll:
Germany:
Belgium:
Netherlands:
CNN’s Nadine Schmidt Barbara Wojazer, Sharon Braithwaite and Joseph Ataman contributed reporting to this post.
A hospital in the Dutch town of Venray, including 200 patients, will be evacuated because of a flood risk, the safety authority for North Limburg said on Friday.
The authority said that 200 patients will be transferred to other hospitals starting Friday afternoon, and emergency patients will be sent to other hospitals starting at 6 p.m. local time.
The death toll in Belgium from the flooding has risen to 15, the Wallonia government spokesperson Eric Biering told CNN.
At least 103 people are dead in Germany, bringing the total death toll in western Europe from the severe flooding to 118.
At least 103 people have died in Germany following torrential rainfalls that swept through the country, hundreds are still missing, authorities said Friday, bringing the Europe-wide death toll to 117.
The death toll in Rhineland-Palatinate has risen to at least 60, the state premier Malu Dreyer said Friday, adding that there was bad news every hour.
”In the meantime, the assessment of all of us is that the damage is so dramatic and enormous that we will have to deal this issue for a long time to come, including the reconstruction of municipalities,” he continued.
Earlier, police in Koblenz in Rhineland-Palatine initially said up to 1,300 people were unaccounted – mainly as a result of phone lines being down – but now say they expect those numbers to be revised down as phone lines are restored and rescue operations continue.
As least 43 people have died in Germany’s most populous state populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia, the state’s Interior Ministry spokeswoman Katja Heins told CNN.
Armin Laschet, North-Rhine Westphalia’s state premier called the flash floods on Friday ”a catastrophe of historic proportions”, adding that more fatalities are expected as a result.
”The floods have literally pulled the rug from under people’s feet,” Laschet said.
The German military has deployed 850 staff in a total of 20 counties in Northrein-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, a spokesman said at a press briefing in Berlin Friday.
The German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday urged that climate action is needed to prevent disasters like this in future. ” Only if we take up the fight against climate change decisively, we will be able to prevent we will be able to keep extreme weather conditions such as those we are experiencing” Steinmeier said in Berlin.
A hole has formed in the dike (or embankment) alongside the Juliana Canal in the Dutch province of South Limburg, and the regional safety authority has warned residents to urgently close all windows and doors as “there is no more time to leave the house.”
“This area will be under water. This is also the reason that sirens are sounding at the moment.”
