A week into the region’s worst flooding disaster in living memory, which has killed at least 172 in Germany, and 201 in total in Europe, the conservatives (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats’ “grand coalition” government unblocked some €400 million ($470 million) in immediate relief. “We will make sure that life can go on,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “We will rebuild – rebuild businesses, rebuild factories, rebuild buildings.”The damage caused by the floods is likely to cost the insurance industry up to five billion euros ($5.9 billion), the GDV insurance industry association said, calling the disaster “one of the most devastating storms in recent history”. Merkel told reporters on a visit to the badly hit medieval town of Bad Muenstereifel on Tuesday that Berlin would come through to help in the short and long term. “Germany has been fortunate for decades in suffering relatively few natural catastrophes,” she told Der Spiegel magazine.

Source: The Local July 21, 2021 07:15 UTC