In the house, the water level can be seen as a brown line, roughly at head height.

A man comes out.

Was he there when the water came?

Instead of answering, he bursts into tears and walks away.

His house is right at the front of the Ahr, where the view over the small river and into the valley must be wonderful at normal times.

Now it is no longer possible to tell where the garden of the house used to be.

Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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As if by a miracle, the building has stood still, even if part of the canopy seems to be missing. Everything around it was full of rubbish and mud. In front of it, the still much too wide brown water masses of the Ahr push past. Trees have been snapped off or peeled off by the rubbish drifting by. Half of the half is missing from the house opposite. The bridge below is no longer there.

The town of Insul in the Ahrweiler district in Rhineland-Palatinate was badly hit by the flood that hit western Germany in the night from Wednesday to Thursday. On Friday, the second day after the disaster, the death toll is constantly being revised upwards. More than 60 deaths have so far been counted in Rhineland-Palatinate, said Prime Minister Malu Dreyer (SPD) at noon. "Suffering is increasing dramatically today because we get new bad news every hour," she says. In the afternoon it was said that more than a hundred deaths were to be mourned in the flood areas in Germany.

Many had been surprised by the force of the water that night.

Around 100 are still missing.

Some were simply carried away by the flood, others drowned in their apartments or basements.

Twelve residents perished in a facility for the disabled in Sinzig alone.

A spokesman for the sponsoring association said on Friday that the flood more or less surprised her in her sleep.

In 2016 there was a so-called flood of the century.

The Ahr had a water level of 3.5 meters.

Now it was about 7.5 meters.

Actually, Rhineland-Palatinate is a country that knows floods, Prime Minister Malu Dreyer said during a visit to the region on Thursday evening.

But nobody expected this to be the case.

Only on Friday will it really become clear how big the catastrophe is. Many places have suffered severe damage and it will take years to rebuild. In the Erftkreis in North Rhine-Westphalia, people were still waiting in their flood-washed houses in the morning. Here, as in the village of Schuld an der Ahr, several buildings were simply washed away. In Insul, a little further downstream, parts of the houses are missing. They may be in the mountains of trash hanging in the trees further down. The mud, which smells of petrol, is sometimes knee-deep in front of the houses. Many houses are missing windows and doors, fences have been rolled down, flooded cars are in the garages.

Brown, damaged things keep flying out of the windows. The residents are cleaning up, many are on the street, shoveling mud out of the driveways, taking out garbage that piles up in mountains in the front gardens. Cellars are pumped out, excavators move rubbish aside. The town center has turned into a kind of car junkyard. There are maybe two dozen wrecked vehicles here. After several hours in the water, there is “nothing more to do with drying,” says one man. He keeps a tally of the license plates. In case someone should inquire about their car. But not all of them are here. There were still some vehicles down in the Ahr. Then an excavator comes and takes the cars away. A nearby inn brings food by, a woman serves drinks in a basket. Everyone helps, tell the residents here.