It is a catastrophe of the century such as the people in Rhineland-Palatinate have never experienced.
More than 130 people in the Ahr Valley and the Eifel lost their lives in the flash floods, thousands lost their belongings overnight, and many lost their economic existence.
A disaster in which, as before in the neighboring state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the many victims were commemorated with a state act.
However, as it turned out in the days and weeks that followed, its fatal consequences were more than an inevitable blow of fate out of the blue, but also a "catastrophe with announcement", as CDU opposition leader Christian Baldauf aptly in the Mainz state parliament debate of the state government of SPD Prime Minister Malu Dreyer held up. If the CDU district administrator responsible at the operations center was initially criticized and now also targeted by the public prosecutor, more and more urgent questions are now being directed to Dreyer's Minister of the Interior, Roger Lewentz. Did the top civil protection officer fail to notice the flood warning that the district administrator had apparently ignored in the evening, or did he possibly even leave the bridge in the storm?as the CDU asks? A commission of inquiry on the flood with a vague investigation mandate, which will now be reviewing until 2023, will hardly exhaustively pursue these and other questions about political responsibility. A parliamentary committee of inquiry is the right tool for clarification.