So!
Time to stop my lazy and report, just in case anyone is interested.
Now, Germany is not usually known for natural disasters. We get no hurricanes, our last volcanic eruptions happened during the last Ice Age, tornadoes happen every once in a while but are usually quite harmless. Earthquakes are almost unheard of, and the few that do occur are almost always of the clinking glasses in the shelves variant. Forest fires are also very rare. Once or twice a decade, we get hit by a massive autumn or winter storm, but these are usually Europe-wide phenomena.
Two things that do happen here reasonably often, and are often connected, are floods and thunderstorms. Two years ago, the
pentecost storm system produced a supercell over the Ruhr area which moved northeastward, causing huge damage mostly due to the downburst from the bow echo. Most thunderstorms are quite harmless, though, and floods often occur rather slowly, mostly as a combination of lots of rainfall and snowmelt in winter or spring.
But since 10 days, we have had an incomparable string of bad weather. It started week before last, on Friday, when a low pressure area named Elvira moved from France into Germany - and stopped. Some mild thunderstorms on Friday, stronger ones on Saturday...
...and then on Sunday, the big whopper. An occlusion line had formed over southern Germany, stretching from eastern Badem-Württenberg (the southwest Germany state, east of France and north of Switzerland) all the way into eastern Bavaria and even Austria. Cold air pushed under hot, moist air, raising it high into the atmosphere, creating a string of powerful, concentrated thunderstorms, where just over the span of ten miles, pattering rain could turn into a hailstorm armaggedon, and the other way around.
On the weather radar, this whole thing didn't look THAT bad, and while there were a lot of "red" thunderstorm warnings, it seems the intensity of some of the storms was underestimated. Hardest hit - and the place where the video was shot - was a little town called Braunsbach (literally "Brown Creek", yes, ominous...). This place first got hit by an incredible hailstorm which turned it into a winter landscape, and then it deluged over 100 liters/4 inches of rain in about an hour. It lies in a basin, and it was not even the two little rivers that overflowed - the ground simply was soaked through quickly, and the water ran down directly from the surrounding hills. Turning into what pretty much amounts to a tsunami.
It's a miracle no one was even injured, but on that Sunday, four other people died in other places, two in the nearby city of Schwäbisch Gmünd. A young man was sucked into an open manhole by the current. A fireman tried to save him and drowned as well.
Now, not sure if I've stated it on this forum, but usually, the bad weather is where I am not.
And this thunderstorm line, over night, rotated like a lever arm northwestward while rapidly weakening on its eastern end. It moved past me 50 km to the west and we did not get a drop of rain.
I went to bed shortly after 4 in the morning, but was awoken by the slight murmur of thunder just 75 minutes later. I first decided to turn around and continue sleeping, but then rain started to pitter-patter down, and more thunder came, and I decided to get up and check what was coming. And indeed, a powerful storm was moving right at us and increasing in intensity!! I barely got my computer shut down and unplugged when it was fully upon us. Lightning struck just 100 meters away, and ear-shattering crash, and we got a deluge of rain and hail - though not very large grains, I never saw any, just heard their impacts on the surrounding metal roofs of sheds. We probably got nearly an inch of rain - whereas the measurement from my observatory was a paltry 3 liters/0.1 inches.
The western part of the thunderstorm system slowly moved into Rhineland-Palatinate, my home state. In the afternoon, I called my mom to ask how it was. She told me it had rained a lot but was quieting down. She had not really seen much news. But anyway, she had to quit, and go shopping.
Ten minutes later, she calls me back. My parents house is on a small hill, and the road leads down into the lower valley - she just 50 meters before having to stop, as the main road down there had turned into a river.
100 meters upvalley, our creek goes underground, but it had swollen so much, and was carrying so much detritus, it stopped up the drain and overflowed. She was furthermore told that further down in the village, the main north-south road was completely blocked for several blocks.
I looked up our local newspaper in the Internet and found this. Turns out that the creek one side valley over had reacted even more aggressively to the rain and created a mud slide. Looking at those pics was really eerie. While you never see it directly, there's a supermarket just off some of the pictures (e.g., just to the right of #6, #23) where we go shopping very often! But of course, I was not there...
Since then, it's been thunderstorms and floods EVERY DAY. Nothing as extreme as Braunsbach on that Sunday, but on Wednesday, multiple place in eastern Bavaria got similarly destructive floods; in the last days, the northeastern part of Rhineland-Palatinate was struck hard. The Rock am Ring festival had to be ended prematurely, on Friday, a lightning strike had injured over 80 people, some of them severely, two had to be reanimated. These floods mostly strike small rivers, the total amount of rain has not been enough to raise the big rivers (Moselle, Rhine, Danube) to truly dangerous levels.
Here, except for some showers on Friday, nothing at all has happened since that storm a week ago. Hot and sultry.
In the next few days, finally, cooler air is supposed to prevail, ending this mess.
Okay, not going to lie ... 1st hurricane ... kind of jazzed for it ... 
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