"We were standing in the street hip-deep in water," says resident Christine Schumacher. The basement of her row of houses was completely submerged after the fatal heavy rain in the summer of 2021. She doesn't even have a shake of the head for the city's warning that flooding "could affect properties and buildings along creeks, but also away from the creeks in the middle of the development and cause considerable damage to the property".

Resident feels abandoned by the city of Bonn

Schumacher - like her neighbour Ljazat Jegel - feels "bitterly" abandoned by the city. Therefore, the statement that "the sewage system in Bonn is not designed to cope with the masses of water that fall during heavy rainfall - as is the case everywhere in Germany" seems to her to be sheer mockery. "How can it be that the cause has been recognised but nothing is done?" she asks. She enumerates: "They know that the stream culvert at Bahnhofstraße is too narrow; then there is the mill." There too, she says, the subway of the stream is also too small. "There was then the backwater upstream." Since the banks of the stream are low in the Alfter area, the water overflowed there and flowed into the cellars of the houses An der Knappenmühle from the street side. "The culverts are still too small today and in Alfter the stream can still overflow its banks," Schumacher is annoyed. "All that has been done," she says, is to set up a camera in front of the culvert on Bahnhofstraße to monitor the grate. In her eyes, that is too little.

Damage of 50,000 Euro

Her building damage of more than 50,000 Euro has been repaired in the meantime. After deducting a ten per cent contribution, the insurance company has also paid. On the other hand, everything that was stored in her cellar has been lost forever due to the lack of insurance. The civil engineering office of the city of Bonn now advises all those affected "to inform themselves in good time and to take their own protective measures." Schumacher has long since followed this advice with considerable investment of her own. She has bought a fire pump with a C-pipe, an emergency generator and a moisture sensor in the cellar that informs her by app on her mobile phone in an emergency. A rain gauge in the garden would also warn her on holiday if there were ever more than one day of heavy downpours.

Like her neighbour, she has surrounded the cellar shafts around the house with a 50-centimetre-high wall. "If it were to overflow, the water would already come in through the front door," she says. Despite all the personal suffering and frustration she has experienced, it is hard for her to read that the city is supporting all citizens of Bonn "with a variety of information offers to help them determine their own risk situation and take precautions themselves".