Germany defends preparation for floods, considers lessons

German officials are defending their preparations for flooding in the face of the raging torrents last week that caught many people by surprise and left over 180 people dead in Western Europe

BERLIN -- German officials are defending their preparations for flooding in the face of the raging torrents that caught many people by surprise and left over 180 people dead in Western Europe, but they concede that they will need to learn lessons from the disaster. Efforts to find any more victims and clean up the mess left behind by the floods across a swath of western Germany, eastern Belgium and the Netherlands continued on Monday as floodwaters receded. The downpours that led to usually small rivers swelling at vast speed in the middle of last week had been forecast, but warnings of potentially catastrophic damage didn't appear to have found their way to many people on the ground — often in the middle of the night. “As soon as we have provided the immediate aid that stands at the forefront now, we will have to look at whether there were things that didn't go well, whether there were things that went wrong, and then they have to be corrected,” Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told the Bild newspaper. “That isn't about finger-pointing — it's about improvements for the future.”