The Rhine swept to its greatest height in 67 years Thursday, flooding Cologne's old town, menacing the new Parliament building in Bonn and washing over the train tracks in the fairy tale gorge of the Lorelei.
A fourth flooding death was recorded in Germany when a 16-year-old boy rode his motorbike into a flooded house in Koblenz and was electrocuted. Another death was reported in Belgium, and one in France.Thousands were evacuated from houses in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, where flooding caused by four days of torrential downpours halted Paris-to-Brussels high-speed rail traffic and closed many secondary roads.
In Bonn, ducks floated tranquilly by the Parliament balconies while workers pumped out Chancellor Helmut Kohl's parking spot in an underground garage.
Inside, border patrol troops in muddy hip waders double-timed over marble floors carrying sandbags to shore up the underground room where the building's central heating, air conditioning and electrical systems are located.
A concrete barrier was supposed to prevent flooding, but water was dripping through seams and was about five feet deep in the courtyard, pressing against the windows of a room where deputies gather for weekly prayer.
Kohl and the legislators were back in their home districts for Christmas.
A soaking, cold Christmas cleanup awaited tens of thousands of people, and millions in Christmas sales were lost as waters streamed into business districts from Regensburg in Bavaria to Duesseldorf in the north.
"It's going to be a great Christmas for my colleagues and their families," Juergen Vesper of the Cologne firefighters said sarcastically.
The rail line that passes the castles and the fairy tale Lorelei rock of the Rhine gorge was submerged near Neuwied, between Bonn and Koblenz, forcing rerouting and delays.
The river was expected to crest in Cologne about midnight Thursday near the 35.6-feet record high from 1926.
Shipping traffic on the Rhine, the main north-south commercial waterway in Europe, was not expected to resume until after the weekend. More rain was forecast in some areas.
In southwest Germany, U.S. and French soldiers pitched in to help German colleagues build barriers and rescue those trapped by high waters.
Also hit hard were Trier, Germany's oldest city near the border with Luxembourg, and the famous wine center of Cochem, where the Mosel River reached upper stories of hundreds of homes and office buildings.
In Cologne, which last flooded 10 years ago, the Rhine's brown waters began pouring Wednesday night over a steel barrier erected earlier in the day and flooding the narrow alleys of the city's historic center.