Abrown line one and a half metres high on the kitchen wall marks where the waters reached when Christian Ulrich’s house was inundated. The electrician stands amid the mud-splattered walls and his voice breaks as he recalls how he had barely enough time after the warning came to reach the cellar to get food and water and send his mother up the stairs. He had just managed to let in the neighbours who had banged on the door for help, when there was an “almighty crash – like an explosion” as a huge wave of water rolled in from the back and front of the house, so strong it pushed out the front door and many of the windows. Eight days on, Ulrich, standing in the ruins, says he can finally “breathe again”, thanks to a man on a mechanical digger outside on Bachemer Strasse, who has spent the last few days on the street clearing the rubble from Ulrich’s family home and others. The downstairs furniture and fittings, and the contents of the cellar, still fill the street, but he says the smelly heap is now only a fraction of the height it was. “We are just so grateful to these people. But we are saddened that there has so far been very little official help,” he says. A banner hanging from an upstairs window, where Ulrich’s mother is trying to recover from the trauma, reads: “Thank you dear helpers”. Ingo Mellenthin, who is operating the digger – lent by a landscaping company – with an efficient calm, travelled from Herten, 100 miles away, to volunteer. His son Jonas is in an adjacent street doing the same. “We thought we’d better come here to help, knowing we had skills they might need,” says the self-employed builder, who had been due to go on holiday. A similar scenario is playing out in thousands of homes across this spa town in Rhineland-Palatinate state – all of which are without running water, electricity, or gas – and in turn in scores of towns and villages across the region, some of which are still cut off. Almost 42,000 people have been affected, many losing their homes. In Rhineland-Palatinate alone, 128 people have died. A further 766 were injured and 155 people remain missing. In street after street, lines of mud-coated volunteers scoop the gunge from cellars and ground floors in buckets and pass them on. The last in the chain dumps the mud in the street. Many punctuate the work with a joke or a song. One group of women and girls, calling themselves “Paw Patrol”, are clearing the cellar of a physiotherapy practice on Ahrhutstrasse. “It’s time to help, simple as that,” says Hatice Sadet. The youngest helper spotted is seven-year-old Eno, in wellington boots, who alongside many others is pushing a shovel into the thick sticky grey mud which has to be watered down to stop it from clogging the drains. On the market square, Hartmut Schönhöfer is busy stripping the plaster from the walls of the picturesque 18th-century Marktbrunnen (market fountain) pub, which he and his wife, Martina Caspers, the owner, had spent the best part of lockdown painstaking renovating. It was due to open in three weeks’ time. “When the waters came it was like pinball as it seemed to come from all over the place and really fast,” he says. “Cars were swimming down the street. “None of us died – for that we’re grateful,” he adds. “But our tragedy is that we had put €300,000 net (£256,000), into the renovation and we’ll need another €150,000-€200,000 to restore it now. But we have no elemental damage insurance [to cover storms and severe weather]. It was just not available.” The story is repeated in homes and businesses across the town. At Dr von Ehrenwall’s clinic for psychiatry and neurology, the deputy administration manager, Heike Heideck, delegates jobs to staff who have gathered to help with the cleanup. About 150 patients had to be moved to the top floors where they stayed the night before being evacuated to a makeshift shelter in a Haribo sweet factory. In Kurgartenstrasse in another district, on a strolling promenade popular with rich weekenders from Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and further afield, the Förtsches are sorting through the remains of their antique shop. “Here, take this as a souvenir,” Udo Förtsch half jokes, picking up a mud-smeared Marc Chagall print. His wife Uschi washes down some brass statues and a glass vase and places them in a plastic box. But more or less all the rest of their €150,000 of stock is destroyed. They are not insured either. “We planned to retire in a couple of years. We can forget that now,” he says. A fellow shop owner comes to tell them that their landlord’s 18-year-old daughter was drowned as she tried to get the car out of the garage as the waters came. “We are the lucky ones,” Uschi Förtsch says, wiping away tears. Steps away, the curtains of the five-star Steigenberger hotel flap in the wind. The windows were smashed by the force of the water, their frames buckling along with the pipes and lamp-posts outside. A ballroom is thick with mud, and plates, cutlery and champagne buckets are scattered across the floor. A Peugeot has been flung against the hotel terrace. “It’s like Bosnia after the war,” says Tim, from a Gummersbach firm specialising in construction cleanups who has just arrived and is surveying the scene from the banks of the brown, fast-flowing River Ahr. In the Ahrweiler district a non-stop column of trucks and tractors, lent or driven by local farmers, gardening centres and construction firms, drive through the Ahrtor, one of four gates in the old town’s ancient wall, and queue up to tip seemingly unending loads of the mud-drenched contents of homes and businesses – washing machines, carpets, wine barrels, bird houses, shop models, car seats – on to a huge heap. A digger operator is tasked with compressing the mound as much as possible and loading it onto trucks which are transporting it to incinerators across Germany and the Netherlands. Spotting a red carpet from a hotel or restaurant in the waste, he picks it up in the teeth of his excavator bucket and waves it at his fellow workers, offering a brief moment of levity amid the misery. The efficiency of the operation is fine-tuned to the extent that lorry maintenance engineers are on hand to offer repairs for everything from tyre punctures to loose screws, for which demand is high. The Auths have driven their “Brat King” (Grill King) catering truck the 160 miles from Fulda, stocked with thousands of sausages and other donations from butchers, supermarkets and individuals, to feed helpers and residents. Maria, whose restaurant, Delphi, is in ruins, together with Lily, a waitress, tuck into a currywurst and chips as they take a break from cleaning up. Lily recalls leaving work early after a flood warning came late on the night of Wednesday 14 July, and driving on the bridge over the river Ahr towards home. “I swear I could feel it shifting,” she says. Several cars were on it when it subsequently collapsed. “I think if I’d been 15 minutes later I might have been swept away.” She points to the bridge, just metres away, which appears to have snapped in two. An excavator trying to clear the rubble around it has just toppled over into the fast-flowing water, but the driver has been hauled to safety. Close by, next to the riverbank, part of the fire station has collapsed, its garage doors buckled, though luckily the fire brigade managed to drive the vehicles out in time. A few metres further on, the town’s cemetery lies desecrated. Cars and a van are tossed among broken gravestones and there is hardly a blade of grass in sight. Benjamin Monschau tends to the grave of his grandfather Erich. The headstone is still standing but, with the help of a friend, he’s trying to free the rest from the mass of sticky mud. “I didn’t want to let my grandmother see it like this,” he says. Masks are worn here primarily to protect from mud, dust and bacteria, rather than coronavirus. A muddy handprint has become a hallmark of the cleanup effort. Elisabeth Parschau has placed two of hers on the front of her boyfriend’s T-shirt. “What we need right now is a lot of love, and to hope it keeps coming – the town will need a lot of help in the coming months,” she says. She is sitting playing her piano flanked by two water tanks delivered earlier by the army, outside their house with its bucolic courtyard laced with grapevines. The instrument, which stood in half a metre of water, is ruined, she says. But before it’s carted away with the rest of the debris, she has chalked the invitation “Spiel mich” – play me – on it. Residents and rescue workers in need of a respite have been readily taking up the offer.