Finnish lake district in Southern Germany?

More than two days of continual and heavy rains are behind us.

Sunday morning the rainfall stopped in the region where I live.

The rain raised the water levels of our local brooks, creeks and rivers continuously, so that they passed over their beds and flooded the land around.

During a short rain break on Saturday afternoon we made a trip through the valley of the Tauber,
our small local river.

In the hometown of my parents I had to check if the water penetrated into the basement of my parent's house, but fortunately everything was OK. But many houses close to the river had less luck and needed the support of the volunteer fire brigade to pump out their cellars.

Our little river Tauber, whose bed has a normel width of 8 - 15 meters, now looked like a lake district with a width of up to 500 meters in some places.

But all in all our region wasn't in such a hard luck like many regions in the south and southeast of Germany, in Austria and in Czech Republic.

There they have a once-in-a-five-hundred-years flood and that's a real desaster for hundreds of thousands of people after they already had a flood of the century in 2002.

Driving back to my hometown we took photos of some flooded allotment gardens, where the strawberries or the flowers looked like little islands within a sea of brown water.

Back in Bad Mergentheim, we checked the flood mark at the Wolfgangsbrücke,
the bridge of Saint Wolfgang.

Here the situation was tensed, but not too critically.

Even without stop sigh no cyclist had the with to follow the bikeway.

Dark tourism & Main river flood at Wertheim

"Es is uf der ganze Erde,

nergends schönner als in Werthe!"

--> Es ist auf der ganzen Erde nirgends schöner als in Wertheim!

--> Nowhere on Earth it's more beautifully than in Wertheim!

But certainly not today and tomorrow.

Today Wertheim was preparing for the flooding of its old town center.

While smaller rivers already crested their maximum water level, Germany's bigger rivers still have an increase of the water line.

That's a view on the river Main at the town of Wertheim on Sunday 9 January 2011. You can see the lampposts which normally stand along the waterfront of the Main.

Here's the driveway and subway for pedestrians to the parking area along the waterfront

House facades along the river Tauber, a tributary of the river Main, which has its mouth into the Main at Wertheim, too.

The THW - das Technische Hilfwerk - the German technical emergency service - supported together with volunteer fire brigades Wertheim's inhabitants with sandbags and flood barrieres.

In the town center they built up special footways so that the pedestrians will be able to walk through the town even when the pedestrian zone is underwater - this was expected for Monday early afternoon.