AHRWEILER, Germany — With the death toll and economic damage from last week's floods in Germany continuing to rise, some residents are asking why systems designed to warn people of the impending disaster didn't work.
Residents of the Ahr valley, which was hardest hit by the floods, say they were given little warning and no sense of the scale of the danger.
Local officials who were responsible for triggering disaster alarms on July 14 have kept a low profile since the flood.
State authorities declined Friday to comment on what mistakes might have been made. But the head of Germany's federal disaster agency acknowledged this week that "things didn't work as well as they could have."
