Gaping holes of muddy brown water where manicured streets used to be. Huge piles of abandoned belongings set on fire because there’s nowhere else to put the trash. Army tanks rolling through once picturesque villages now turned to rubble.

Northwestern Europeans—accustomed to a mild climate rarely troubled by the extremes of weather they see on the news—were not prepared for the scenes they saw this week after the worst flooding to hit the region in at least 80 years.

“People kept saying it was worse than the war,” says Arne Piepke, from the DOCKS photography collective, which captured the scenes in western Germany—the center of the flooding. War was the best analogue locals could think of for the death and destruction wrought by the weather, he says. “This just hasn’t happened here before.”