Anyone who is currently walking through the towns along the Ahr in the evening sees almost nothing: in Bad-Neuenahr, for example, many streets are black, only now and then a lantern powered by a generator lights up.
Most of the flood-damaged houses are also dark;
the residents have found shelter elsewhere, the rooms are empty.
Julian Staib
Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.
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In many places the power supply has not yet been restored and in most houses the water has destroyed the heating.
Only up to Marienthal, shortly after Bad-Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, was the valley supplied with gas pipelines; further up the river, oil was mostly used for heating.
When the masses of water shot through the Ahr valley on the night of July 15, the gas pipes burst and the oil tanks flooded.
"We have to find quick solutions how to get through the winter," says Horst Gies.
He is a member of the state parliament of the CDU as well as first district member and he currently represents the district administrator of the Ahrweiler district, Jürgen Pföhler.
“Let's not sit in the cold,” asks Gies.
“We're running out of time.” There won't be any oil tanks on the Ahr again, he says.
Individual solutions are required, such as heating with wood pellets. And that quickly. "Unfortunately, it will not be possible to connect all households to a functioning network until the heating season, although the suppliers are working at full speed on it," said the Supervision and Service Directorate (ADD) of the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of the Interior, which is currently in charge of the operation. Due to the immense destruction “alternatives to heating the houses would have to be found”, according to the ADD.
Several localities are currently setting up temporary accommodation.
The problem with this: Nobody knows how long it will take to rebuild or renovate the houses.
So, on the one hand, so-called Tiny Houses, i.e. small, mobile houses in which people can live in the medium term, and on the other hand, residential containers for short-term accommodation are to be ordered.
In Mendig, for example, according to the ADD, a container village has already been opened that is available as alternative accommodation to people who have become homeless.
"It is foreseeable that some people will have to stay in alternative quarters for a longer period of time," says Gies.
Aid can be requested in October
His family was badly hit by the flood themselves. His sister-in-law was buried on Friday, she drowned in the floods. His wife's parents' house is also affected by the flood; a small house of his mother, built around 1900, was probably so badly destroyed that it has to be demolished. During the flood night, his son spent seven hours in a tree in the cemetery in Ahrweiler. There, too, the water was two to three meters high; the cemetery is devastated today. He has known the Ahr all his life, learned to swim in it, says Gies, and then the river suddenly turns into a monster.