"We Can Replace All The Material Things"

For Wolfgang Vogt, the way back home took him through streets flooded with oily water that reached up to his knees, past countless submerged cars and to a block, several streets away from where his apartment and beer garden and restaurant once stood.

“It is a very nice beer garden – was a very nice beer garden,” said Vogt, who like many in Laubegast, is having a difficult time using the past tense.

On Friday, the residents of this suburb on the Elbe River just north of Dresden, left their homes for good after their neighborhood became an island. On Sunday, they came back to begin a process that thousands of Dresden’s residents will undertake this week: assessing just how drastically their lives have changed in the wake of last week’s floods.

The water caught everyone off-guard

“The heating and electricity are completely gone,” said Eberhard Matteschk, taking a break from shifting sandbags away from his garden gate, were they had been submerged under 2 meters of water over the past two days.

Matteschk and his son, Dietmar, who owns the house next door, came to their street by boat and then foot early Sunday morning. The pair had waded out in chest-high water Friday afternoon after the sandbag dam built down the street burst under the pressure of the flooding water.

There was little time to pack their bags. Like most of the residents in this neighborhood, the fast-rising Elbe took them completely by surprise.

“The warnings that came, were very hard to figure out because everyone gave a different water level update at different hours,” said Eberhard Matteschk.

The pair stayed with local residents, police officers, firefighters and members of Germany’s disaster relief team THW (Technische Hilfswerk) and built up the sandbag dam on Thursday. The river was rising at a rate of 7 to 8 centimeters per hour, said Matteschk, pushing water well beyond the fields left free along the river to absorb such overflow.

Giving up the last stand

“I thought, when it comes past Österreich Street, then everything is gone,” said resident Thomas Schmidt-Hammel. “And that’s how it went actually.”

Österreich Street, which runs parallel to the Elbe and is located only half a block up the street from Matteschk’s house, is where the final sandbag wall stood until the dozens of volunteers and residents and aid workers abandoned it in sheer exhaustion Friday night.

Though large parts of the street remained flooded two days later, the water level had begun to visibly recede.

Officials say it could be more than a week until the flooding in Dresden and its suburbs is down to a manageable level. Large police armored cars and boats continued to patrol the streets of Laubegast on Sunday looking for problems.

Authorities, politicians should have done more

For Vogt, their presence was too little, too late. Like others in the water-swept city, Vogt has begun asking why officials didn’t know more about how the massive flood waters making their way down the Elbe.

“In this day and age, we can measure where troops are being deployed but not measure what sort of thing is coming up on us?” said Vogt, as he hurried back to his son-in-law’s house. “You had to have known that that was coming and let the people know how serious it is.”

Vogt had similar scorn for the country’s politicians, who have made highly-publicized, not always popular, stops in Dresden and the rest of the flood areas in Saxony.

“If they don’t prove now that they’re clever and can support the people, then they’ll be voted out – every one of them,” he warned.

At the moment, the beer garden owner feels more secure depending on the help of his neighbors in Laubegast.

Out of disaster, solidarity

A sense of practical optimism was settling in on Sunday, even as many were astounded by and coming to grips with the extent of the damage.

Neighbors helped one another pump out their basements or transport valuables away from their homes. A practical barter system has even emerged where the use of a pump is exchanged for, say, a barbecue dinner.

"I look at it very positively," said Mattscheck, his tank top and swimsuit spattered in mud. "All the material things we can replace. I just thank god no one was injured."

Then he points to a case of beer that survived the rising waters.

"Thank God it's not gone," he said, pausing briefly. "Everything's not so bad."