The ferry path has disappeared. As have the towpath, the Schilfschneiderweg and the Südstraße. Michael Ahner stands on an asphalt roundabout and explains the layout of the streets, properties and buildings. “There are the commercial areas, on the other side the residential buildings, and right at the back is the sewage treatment plant that we built,” he says. If you follow his gaze, you will see farmland, a seemingly endless cornfield. Nothing else.
The streets no longer exist, as do the buildings, the street lamps, the water pipes, telephone lines and gardens. In Röderau on the Elbe in northern Saxony, an entire district has disappeared from the face of the earth, including a sewage treatment plant, a bakery, two car dealerships and a steel construction company. “Perhaps you can find a few supply pipes deep underground, but that’s all,” says Ahner. “With today’s knowledge, you can say,” admits the 67-year-old: “It was a mistake that Röderau-Süd was built in the first place.” Ahner planned the district in the early 1990s; at the time he was the municipality’s building authority director.
In 2002, the flood of the century on the Elbe also flooded Röderau-Süd. The new housing development, which was only a few years old at the time, was not rebuilt. Around 80 buildings were demolished, the streets dismantled, and around 400 people relocated. There is hardly any other place in Germany where the authorities have taken such drastic measures after a flood, “relocating” an entire district, as the official German term goes.
Now, after the devastating floods in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, experts are again calling for “the rivers to be given more space”. Geographer Thomas Roggenkamp from the University of Bonn, who was invited as an expert to the parliamentary committee of inquiry in Mainz on the 2021 Ahr Valley flood, warns urgently: In extreme cases, it is not enough to build dams, dikes and sheet pile walls or to create retention basins and retention areas. “When it comes to flood protection, the first option is to stay out of the floodplain,” says Roggenkamp. “Settling in the floodplain of a river is a bad idea per se.”
But the idea that people actually retreat to less endangered locations is “unfortunately illusory,” says the scientist. Flood victims, politicians and the officials responsible quickly forget, they suppress it. Experts call this “flood dementia.” The bureaucratic problems and legal hurdles in relocation are too great, the resistance of those affected and the associated costs are too great. In the Ahr valley, reconstruction is in full swing, often completed. The fact that an entire district was demolished in Saxony after the Elbe floods will remain the exception. This was possible due to a situation that was unique at the time.
On August 16, 2002, a Friday, the Elbe dam broke not far from Röderau. It was around eight o’clock. It had rained heavily for days beforehand, and many towns upstream of the Elbe had long been under water. The residents of Röderau-Süd felt safe nonetheless. A few days before the dam broke, employees of the district administration came and warned the Röderau residents in the new development area: the flood is coming, you better leave your houses! “People were sitting around having a barbecue and just laughing,” says one person who was there at the time. The district lies in a loop of the Elbe, is a flood zone, a risk zone. This was already known in the GDR era.
The community nevertheless placed its hopes for growth on the area near the Elbe. Röderau wanted to grow, unlike the steel and pasta town of Riesa on the other side of the river, which had been damaged by the fall of the Berlin Wall. “After 1989, we were in a spirit of optimism,” recalls Ahner, the head of the building authority at the time. “We had no other areas. There was a development plan for Röderau-Süd, everything was done according to the law.”
The plan was submitted to around 40 institutions for review, including the state’s environmental agency, the state dam administration, the river management office, other authorities and ministries. There were objections and conditions, but no fundamental veto. In 1992, development of the district, which is separated from the town center by a federal highway and noise barriers, began. “There were people who had bought and built there in 2000. The new kitchen had just been built and then the flood came,” Ahner remembers.
In the summer of 2002, the water stood for days in the Röderau-Süd district, and it took two or three weeks for it to drain away. It stank of oil from tipped heating tanks, of rubbish and rot. Matthias Brade stands in front of the ruins of his house. The master baker from Röderau was one of the first to build in the new district. On German Unity Day in 1994, he and his employees moved into the new bakery. “The atmosphere was great, we could see blooming landscapes,” he remembers.
In August 2002, the water in his bakery was two and a half meters deep. “After the flood came the heat, bacteria had formed everywhere. It looked terrible,” recalls the now 67-year-old. The result: total material loss. The amount of damage: seven figures. “It was clear to me immediately: we are not rebuilding it,” says Brade.
The master baker had natural hazard insurance. And the then Prime Minister of Saxony, Georg Milbradt (CDU), had promised comprehensive support to anyone who wanted to settle elsewhere. The land could be transferred to the Free State, a committee of experts valued the buildings and land, and the state government sent a state secretary who spent a long time on site negotiating compensation with those affected.
Not everyone wanted to give up. As soon as the water had gone, the first people began to clear out their houses and dry them out. Röderau-Süd was their retirement home or the first home for young families. But the state decided to relocate them. “I would have given the property away, I just wanted to get away,” says Brade. “The relocation was also possible because Röderau-Süd had only been built recently and the residents there were not yet so closely connected to their district. And because many people realized that it was wrong to build there anyway.”
The state government had consistently decided to relocate the Röderau residents – that was a key reason why it could be implemented. “The acceptance of measures – even unconventional, sometimes more drastic ones – is often greatest immediately after an event,” says risk researcher Thomas Kox. “In the case of Röderau-Süd, the flood and the damage initially attracted a lot of media interest. This was exacerbated by the federal election campaign at the time, which resulted in increased political involvement,” says Kox, who is, among other things, head of a research group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. “This in turn led to a high level of financial backing for the relocation measure, with funding being acquired relatively quickly.”
The “relocation” cost the state an estimated 40 million euros. In the end, none of those affected suffered a financial loss, in fact the opposite, according to locals. The flood of 2002, which was followed by the one in 2013, and Röderau-Süd are no longer spoken of in the town. When Ahner suggested commemorating the event 20 years later with a photo exhibition, there was hardly any response.
In the Ahr Valley, a different approach is being taken, with excavators and bulldozers rolling in to rebuild. The majority of the 9,000 damaged buildings are to be and have been repaired or rebuilt. The “depopulation” of large parts of towns along a river would be a gigantic task with incalculable costs and legal problems.
There is a lack of replacement land and residents do not want to leave their homes. The lower Ahr valley, where the most serious personal injuries and property damage occurred, is particularly densely populated. “Several tens of thousands of people would be affected,” says geographer Roggenkamp. “Such a relocation is unthinkable.”
And so rebuilding is going on, even in the flood plains that were designated by the state after the flood. Since then, the restrictions set out in the Federal Water Resources Act have actually been in place there: building anything or even designating new building areas is basically prohibited.
But houses that were already there are protected. The Federal Environment Ministry is working on tightening the requirements, but so far affected homeowners have often been forced by politicians to hold on to their plots of land. Federal aid money, for example, is only available for the reconstruction of a house. Anyone who decides not to rebuild their destroyed building will receive nothing.
It is therefore not surprising that the flood victims on the Ahr, unlike in Röderau, do not want to give way and give the river “more space”.
