- Email: [email protected]
Floods on opposite German borders
Environmental Hazards 1 (1999) 77}79
Editor's note During the 1990s river #oods have become an increasingly serious problem in Europe. Manifestations of #ooding vary across the continent. Most prominent have been #ash #oods that wreak havoc in small rocky "re-prone watersheds of Mediterranean lands and high Alpine valleys as well as prolonged large-scale #oods along major lowland rivers like the Rhine, Elbe and Oder. Considerable attention has been paid to the accompanying upsurge in #ood losses, not least by European hazard scientists and European-based #ood reinsurance companies like Swiss Re. Among others, blame has been variously attributed to the ill-advised economic development of #oodplains, failure to invest in improved #ood protection measures, and shifts in both the levels and
distribution of #ood risks that are occasioned by climate change. In the invited comment which follows, Robert Geipel directs attention to contextual factors * especially those connected with political experience and political traditions * that tend to be missed in broad-brush analyses of European #ood problems but are crucial for the formulation of appropriate public policies. J.K. Mitchell Department of Geography, Rutgers, The State University of NJ, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
1464-2867/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 4 6 4 - 2 8 6 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 5 - X
Floods on opposite German borders Robert Geipel* Emeritus Professor of Geography, Geographisches Institut Technische Universitat Munchen, Aricisstrasse 21, 80290 Munchen 2, Federal Republic of Germany Accepted 27 February 1999 Abstract
The Rhine and the Oder rivers have many similarities. Both are subject to comparable hydroclimate regimes, are #ood prone, are international waterways and have been extensively modi"ed by humans over many hundreds of years. Yet the recent history of #ooding on the German sections of these rivers is distinctively di!erent. Most communities along the Rhine seem to take #oods in stride whereas along the Oder they have been highly disruptive. The disruption has provided a mechanism for helping to integrate disparate parts of the newly reuni"ed German states emergency management system and has highlighted continuing di!erences between Polish and German #ood experiences. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Rhine; Oder; Context; History; Environmental modi"cation
1. Introduction It has been suggested that spatial and temporal contexts exert a strong in#uence on public perceptions of
* Fax: 49-89-2105-2894.
hazards and disasters. Mitchell et al. (1989) developed a model of the relevant contextual factors, which can be tested against the experience of almost-simultaneous #ood events on two big river systems in the West and in the East of Germany, namely the 1996 #oods on the Rhine and the 1997 #oods on the Oder. In both cases, 100 year #oods occurred on multi-national river systems that
1464-2867/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 4 6 4 - 2 8 6 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 3 - 6
78
R. Geipel / Environmental Hazards 1 (1999) 77}79
also mark territorial borders between Germany and neighboring countries * mainly France on the West and Poland in the East. Switzerland and the Netherlands were also involved in the West and the Czech Republic in the East. History, economic development and political systems di!er widely among the respective countries, as do traditions of land use and #ood management.
2. Floods on the Rhine From Basel in Switzerland to Karlsruhe in Baden e!orts have been made for centuries to tame * and make use of * the Rhine River. Beginning in 1817 the engineer Tulla (1770}1828) tried to eliminate meanders in order to shorten travel times for boats and to eradicate the swampy areas that were popularly associated with malarial fever. After the "rst World War the Treaty of Versailles entitled France to build the 112 km long Grand Canal d'Alsace which transferred water from the Rhine to a cascade of dams and basins that produced hydroelectricity in power stations at Kembs (1932), Ottmarsheim (1951) and Fessenheim (1955). The French also added a nuclear power station in Fessenheim on their side of the river, while a similar station at Whyl on the German side was prevented by opposition of nearrevolutionary proportions among wine growers of the Kaiserstuhl district. The Rhine also serves as a waste water canal for a long series of chemical plants from Switzerland to the Ruhr and it carries an enormous load of polluted water down river to Dutch vegetable and #ower growers in the hothouse districts of the delta. Along its 1236 km course the river is #anked by dense strings of settlements, industries and tra$c arteries. Within its 224,000 km catchment area are 13 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, Duesseldorf and Duisburg have more than half a million each, and Cologne hosts about one million. Together they form a high-density development axis which is also one of the core areas of Western Europe. In such an area there is insu$cient land for the construction of #ood retention basins. Downriver communities and states (lander) like Rhinelandpfalz or Nordrhein-Westfalen blame upstream regions like Baden-Wurttemberg and France for delaying the construction of #ood containment works that might reduce downstream #ood peaks in places such as Koblenz, Bonn or Cologne. But in a long history since Roman times Germany's Rhine valley populations have learned to live with the risks of #ooding and do not rank them any higher than manmade hazards like cancer, AIDS, crime, tra$c accidents, juvenile delinquency, pollution or nuclear power. Indeed postcards that show #oodwaters lapping around buildings in riverfront communities are not uncommon tourist items in the middle Rhine valley.
3. Floods on the Oder Compared with the Rhine, the Oder has a comparatively brief history as a national border. It only became one after the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, when Poland was given Silesia, Pommern and the Southern part of East Prussia as compensation for regions lost to the former Soviet Union (Belarus and Ukraine) further East. The Oder-Neisse line remained a border between Poland and another East bloc state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), until 1989. Today 160 km of the international boundary runs along the lower (northern) Oder river between the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland * a democratic country eager to enter the European Union. Like the Rhine the Oder river has a long history of human modi"cation. Fredrick II of Prussia (1712}1786) had the Oderbruch region drained to create new farm lands. Between 1905 and 1931 the lower course of the river was divided into a canalized and a free #owing section. Since 1919 the Oder has also been an international river. Its most important function was to service the transportation of Upper Silesias pit coal to Swedish iron ore plants and vice versa. This trade reached its zenith during the Kaiserreich and the 12 years of the Hitler Reich (1933}1945). But the GDR also made use of the river and founded the industrial town of Eisenhuttenstadt on its banks as a showpiece of central planning in a communist country. On the East German side agriculture was organized into huge state farms (LPG) which were usually founded on the expropriated estates and manors of Prussian gentry. On the Polish side small farms were the rule because the Soviet-era government there permitted private ownership of rural land. Field patterns on both sides of the river clearly demonstrated the contrasts between two brother-nations within the Warsaw pact: huge "elds in the West, small strips in the East. Floods which took place during the summer of 1997 showed up some of the contrasts between hazard perceptions and responses among people from di!erent national backgrounds and during a period when these relationships were changing under the impress of post Cold War political restructuring. The Oder, which is both shorter (854 km) and has a smaller catchment area (120,000 km) than the Rhine, shares with her a similar continental climate that usually delivers less than 500 mm of annual precipitation to its lower reaches. In the mountains, however, the "gure comes close to 1000 mm. But alone, in the "ve days between July 4th and July 9th, 585 mm of rain fall was recorded in headwaters areas. In the Lysa Hora mountains there was even 800 mm, two-thirds of the normal annual precipitation. High pressure over the British Isles diverted cold polar air to the Southeast, while low pressure from Italy sucked warm air to the North. The water gauge at Eisenhuttenstadt, normally
R. Geipel / Environmental Hazards 1 (1999) 77}79
at 278 cm, climbed to 715 cm. At least 5000 km of southern Poland were #ooded. There also 150,000 people had to be evacuated, but only 8000 in the FRG. Big parts of Poland involuntarily served as retention spaces for the #ood. The pressure of one billion m of water on German dikes was relieved because weaker structures on the East bank failed. Rescue teams on the German side included 30,000 soldiers equipped with more than 3000 vehicles and special machinery. This was the biggest military activity in Germany since World War II and * ironically * it took place along an East front but against the forces of Nature. Soldiers were joined by the German version of the US Army Corps of Engineers * the Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), police, "re brigades, Red Cross and civil aid teams including many people from the a!ected population itself. Eight million sandbags were "lled with 177,000 tons of sand or gravel and airlifted to threatened dams by helicopters. Material losses in the three a!ected countries (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic) amounted to about 10 billion DM (c. $5 billion), of which only 800 million were sustained in the FRG. By eight weeks after the breaching of dikes on the German side of the Oder, 130 million marks had been collected by private donors on behalf of
79
the victims. This far exceeded the needs of the 700 persons that were actually a!ected in Germany. So a great part of the funding was diverted to Polish or Czech victims. German donors were encouraged by broad mass media coverage of the events and constant appeals from the press and TV to help our brothers and sisters in distress. Together with reluctance about the uni"cation of Germany, distrust between Wessies and Ossies was swept away by enthusiasm and the Army garnered lavish praise for their handling of the disaster. The military forces were made up of troops from the former East and West Germany which had been the respective spearhead elements of the two enemy states during the Cold War. During the Oder #ood they successfully melded into a single functioning unit. In short, the Oder #oods were a true watershed event. And like the previous years #oods along the Rhine they demonstrated that human adjustment to hazards is often heavily in#uenced by the particularities of temporal and spatial contexts.
Reference Mitchell, J.K., Devine, N., Jagger, K., 1989. A contextual model of natural hazard. Geographical Review 79 (4), 391}409.
Editor's note During the 1990s river #oods have become an increasingly serious problem in Europe. Manifestations of #ooding vary across the continent. Most prominent have been #ash #oods that wreak havoc in small rocky "re-prone watersheds of Mediterranean lands and high Alpine valleys as well as prolonged large-scale #oods along major lowland rivers like the Rhine, Elbe and Oder. Considerable attention has been paid to the accompanying upsurge in #ood losses, not least by European hazard scientists and European-based #ood reinsurance companies like Swiss Re. Among others, blame has been variously attributed to the ill-advised economic development of #oodplains, failure to invest in improved #ood protection measures, and shifts in both the levels and
distribution of #ood risks that are occasioned by climate change. In the invited comment which follows, Robert Geipel directs attention to contextual factors * especially those connected with political experience and political traditions * that tend to be missed in broad-brush analyses of European #ood problems but are crucial for the formulation of appropriate public policies. J.K. Mitchell Department of Geography, Rutgers, The State University of NJ, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
1464-2867/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 4 6 4 - 2 8 6 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 5 - X
Floods on opposite German borders Robert Geipel* Emeritus Professor of Geography, Geographisches Institut Technische Universitat Munchen, Aricisstrasse 21, 80290 Munchen 2, Federal Republic of Germany Accepted 27 February 1999 Abstract
The Rhine and the Oder rivers have many similarities. Both are subject to comparable hydroclimate regimes, are #ood prone, are international waterways and have been extensively modi"ed by humans over many hundreds of years. Yet the recent history of #ooding on the German sections of these rivers is distinctively di!erent. Most communities along the Rhine seem to take #oods in stride whereas along the Oder they have been highly disruptive. The disruption has provided a mechanism for helping to integrate disparate parts of the newly reuni"ed German states emergency management system and has highlighted continuing di!erences between Polish and German #ood experiences. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Rhine; Oder; Context; History; Environmental modi"cation
1. Introduction It has been suggested that spatial and temporal contexts exert a strong in#uence on public perceptions of
* Fax: 49-89-2105-2894.
hazards and disasters. Mitchell et al. (1989) developed a model of the relevant contextual factors, which can be tested against the experience of almost-simultaneous #ood events on two big river systems in the West and in the East of Germany, namely the 1996 #oods on the Rhine and the 1997 #oods on the Oder. In both cases, 100 year #oods occurred on multi-national river systems that
1464-2867/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 4 6 4 - 2 8 6 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 3 - 6
78
R. Geipel / Environmental Hazards 1 (1999) 77}79
also mark territorial borders between Germany and neighboring countries * mainly France on the West and Poland in the East. Switzerland and the Netherlands were also involved in the West and the Czech Republic in the East. History, economic development and political systems di!er widely among the respective countries, as do traditions of land use and #ood management.
2. Floods on the Rhine From Basel in Switzerland to Karlsruhe in Baden e!orts have been made for centuries to tame * and make use of * the Rhine River. Beginning in 1817 the engineer Tulla (1770}1828) tried to eliminate meanders in order to shorten travel times for boats and to eradicate the swampy areas that were popularly associated with malarial fever. After the "rst World War the Treaty of Versailles entitled France to build the 112 km long Grand Canal d'Alsace which transferred water from the Rhine to a cascade of dams and basins that produced hydroelectricity in power stations at Kembs (1932), Ottmarsheim (1951) and Fessenheim (1955). The French also added a nuclear power station in Fessenheim on their side of the river, while a similar station at Whyl on the German side was prevented by opposition of nearrevolutionary proportions among wine growers of the Kaiserstuhl district. The Rhine also serves as a waste water canal for a long series of chemical plants from Switzerland to the Ruhr and it carries an enormous load of polluted water down river to Dutch vegetable and #ower growers in the hothouse districts of the delta. Along its 1236 km course the river is #anked by dense strings of settlements, industries and tra$c arteries. Within its 224,000 km catchment area are 13 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, Duesseldorf and Duisburg have more than half a million each, and Cologne hosts about one million. Together they form a high-density development axis which is also one of the core areas of Western Europe. In such an area there is insu$cient land for the construction of #ood retention basins. Downriver communities and states (lander) like Rhinelandpfalz or Nordrhein-Westfalen blame upstream regions like Baden-Wurttemberg and France for delaying the construction of #ood containment works that might reduce downstream #ood peaks in places such as Koblenz, Bonn or Cologne. But in a long history since Roman times Germany's Rhine valley populations have learned to live with the risks of #ooding and do not rank them any higher than manmade hazards like cancer, AIDS, crime, tra$c accidents, juvenile delinquency, pollution or nuclear power. Indeed postcards that show #oodwaters lapping around buildings in riverfront communities are not uncommon tourist items in the middle Rhine valley.
3. Floods on the Oder Compared with the Rhine, the Oder has a comparatively brief history as a national border. It only became one after the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, when Poland was given Silesia, Pommern and the Southern part of East Prussia as compensation for regions lost to the former Soviet Union (Belarus and Ukraine) further East. The Oder-Neisse line remained a border between Poland and another East bloc state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), until 1989. Today 160 km of the international boundary runs along the lower (northern) Oder river between the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland * a democratic country eager to enter the European Union. Like the Rhine the Oder river has a long history of human modi"cation. Fredrick II of Prussia (1712}1786) had the Oderbruch region drained to create new farm lands. Between 1905 and 1931 the lower course of the river was divided into a canalized and a free #owing section. Since 1919 the Oder has also been an international river. Its most important function was to service the transportation of Upper Silesias pit coal to Swedish iron ore plants and vice versa. This trade reached its zenith during the Kaiserreich and the 12 years of the Hitler Reich (1933}1945). But the GDR also made use of the river and founded the industrial town of Eisenhuttenstadt on its banks as a showpiece of central planning in a communist country. On the East German side agriculture was organized into huge state farms (LPG) which were usually founded on the expropriated estates and manors of Prussian gentry. On the Polish side small farms were the rule because the Soviet-era government there permitted private ownership of rural land. Field patterns on both sides of the river clearly demonstrated the contrasts between two brother-nations within the Warsaw pact: huge "elds in the West, small strips in the East. Floods which took place during the summer of 1997 showed up some of the contrasts between hazard perceptions and responses among people from di!erent national backgrounds and during a period when these relationships were changing under the impress of post Cold War political restructuring. The Oder, which is both shorter (854 km) and has a smaller catchment area (120,000 km) than the Rhine, shares with her a similar continental climate that usually delivers less than 500 mm of annual precipitation to its lower reaches. In the mountains, however, the "gure comes close to 1000 mm. But alone, in the "ve days between July 4th and July 9th, 585 mm of rain fall was recorded in headwaters areas. In the Lysa Hora mountains there was even 800 mm, two-thirds of the normal annual precipitation. High pressure over the British Isles diverted cold polar air to the Southeast, while low pressure from Italy sucked warm air to the North. The water gauge at Eisenhuttenstadt, normally
R. Geipel / Environmental Hazards 1 (1999) 77}79
at 278 cm, climbed to 715 cm. At least 5000 km of southern Poland were #ooded. There also 150,000 people had to be evacuated, but only 8000 in the FRG. Big parts of Poland involuntarily served as retention spaces for the #ood. The pressure of one billion m of water on German dikes was relieved because weaker structures on the East bank failed. Rescue teams on the German side included 30,000 soldiers equipped with more than 3000 vehicles and special machinery. This was the biggest military activity in Germany since World War II and * ironically * it took place along an East front but against the forces of Nature. Soldiers were joined by the German version of the US Army Corps of Engineers * the Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), police, "re brigades, Red Cross and civil aid teams including many people from the a!ected population itself. Eight million sandbags were "lled with 177,000 tons of sand or gravel and airlifted to threatened dams by helicopters. Material losses in the three a!ected countries (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic) amounted to about 10 billion DM (c. $5 billion), of which only 800 million were sustained in the FRG. By eight weeks after the breaching of dikes on the German side of the Oder, 130 million marks had been collected by private donors on behalf of
79
the victims. This far exceeded the needs of the 700 persons that were actually a!ected in Germany. So a great part of the funding was diverted to Polish or Czech victims. German donors were encouraged by broad mass media coverage of the events and constant appeals from the press and TV to help our brothers and sisters in distress. Together with reluctance about the uni"cation of Germany, distrust between Wessies and Ossies was swept away by enthusiasm and the Army garnered lavish praise for their handling of the disaster. The military forces were made up of troops from the former East and West Germany which had been the respective spearhead elements of the two enemy states during the Cold War. During the Oder #ood they successfully melded into a single functioning unit. In short, the Oder #oods were a true watershed event. And like the previous years #oods along the Rhine they demonstrated that human adjustment to hazards is often heavily in#uenced by the particularities of temporal and spatial contexts.
Reference Mitchell, J.K., Devine, N., Jagger, K., 1989. A contextual model of natural hazard. Geographical Review 79 (4), 391}409.